Amid wind and waves, feeling was unreliable—sometimes even misleading.
Many people who had never truly set foot on the ocean imagined it as the swaying that came with trying to tame a wild horse, but the real experience was entirely different.
When a sudden crosswave struck the hull, the first thing that came was not rocking, but a counterintuitive loss of balance.
The world beneath one's feet suddenly lost its weight. The deck, light as a flimsy card, seemed to be violently pulled out from the side. His legs had not bent, yet some inexplicable force pressed down on his knees, pain grinding through joints long tormented by rheumatism.
His left ear went briefly deaf, followed by cold, rough seawater—an entire solid mass reeking of salt and fishy brine—slamming into him and shoving him toward the rail, the mast, or some unknown hard object.
His vision tilted. The shadow of the sails overhead wrapped around half the sky. His stomach was flung up toward his throat, then viciously yanked back into his abdomen. Nausea forced physiological tears from his eyes, where they mingled with the confluence of salt and snow.
Of course, for an old sailor, physical discomfort could be overcome. What was truly terrifying was the brief disappearance of judgment.
For those few breathless seconds, he could not tell whether he was standing, kneeling, or had already been thrown from the deck. The concepts of up and down vanished for a moment, leaving only the instinctive urge to seize something—the sole means of maintaining a connection to the world.
The wave came quickly and receded even faster, so fast it was as if it had never existed.
The upside-down world righted itself in an instant, leaving only soaked clothes, stinging skin, and a belated realization:
This was no ordinary