While Elspeth was off becalming the jollied up "Ptarmigan!"-yelling boiler crew, Jayne scouted about for a strip of sturdy-looking driftwood.  With a chunk in hand, he pushed himself up and into the whale side split, wedging the driftwood twixt the stiffening sides to let the light in.

After threading the bloody rib-side cavity, Jayne squirmed through the gut bag wall and into the stomach's quaggy mire. The sole chink of light crept in through the side-slit at his back.

He lolled to his feet on the rolling gut bag floor, reached up to the sagging stomach roof and grabbed a knobbin of gut muscle, planted his feet, and set out bumbling for the mouth.

At the bone-ribbed throat-way he grasped a thick vein running up like a banister, and climbed. In the fleshy dark at the top hung the whale`s baleen krill-sieve, and wrapped up in it with a shred of cloth for a hammock was a small yellow child.

Jayne stared in silence for a moment.  Dull light chinked through the Ptarmigan's blowhole and glowed on the child's wiry body.  Its skin was a bright jaundicy yellow. 

"Hello," said Jayne, voice echoing in the cartilagey throat-way.

The child sprang from its hammock like a cat at the sound.  It landed on the thick bed of whale tongue, then squirmed and roiled until it was buried beneath the lolling wedge of lukewarm meat.

"Half-mast me and ride," muttered Jayne, watching wide-eyed as the child disappeared under the near-black blanket of tongue. 

The tongue shuffled, fell still.

"Y`ain`t for comin' then?" asked Jayne.

No answer. 

Jayne stood still for a moment, staring at the tongue.  Then he reached up to the baleen overhead and pulled himself up into its lattice work bars alongside the child`s hammock.  It was canvas, torn rough, woven, and tied firm round the baleen bone with huddershank sailor`s knots.  Sat in the hammock was a shard of engraved ivory, a bronze compass glinting in the dull light, and three bare yellow skulls.

Jayne took up the compass, then dropped himself onto the bed of tongue, which flattened under his weight. 

"Is this your compass?" he asked, softening his voice. 

No answer.

"I can`t seem to make it work," he said, tapping on the bronze.  "Figure ye could help us out some?"