Rand has a dream again. It’s veeerrryy interesting. You see, it’s something about running around an M.C. Escher staircase maze with brambles and thorns as the walls. Ba’alzamon, aka one of the 700 names of the Dark One, chases him around. He pricks himself on one of the thorns on the maze wall. This happens for three dozen pages before he wakes up on the boat heading down the Arinelle River. His finger still bleeds… yowza!

Boat life is pretty fun. In order to avoid general crew disgruntlement and a possible mutiny, Thom spends a lot of time juggling and standing on his head and stuff. The kind of shenanigans that passes for amusement when you have nothing but a piece of rope to play with. To keep up appearances, Thom continues to pretend Rand and Mat are gleeman apprentices and he starts teaching them the gleeman ways of clowning around like goofs!

The boat travels about six meters per hour down the river. Even fat Perrin could walk faster than this, so Rand keeps a lookout in case he catches him or Egwene wandering around aimlessly on the riverbank. A particularly cranky crew member named Gelb always looks like he wants to slit the new travelers’ throats, but the rest of the crew hates Gelb anyway and they make him clean latrines all day. While passing through a canyon-like area of the river, there are dozens of statues of kings and queens that look like they’ve been there for centuries. Domon is a jovial captain and regales Rand with tales of all sorts of strange sights the world has. You could spend a lifetime chasing them down, and that’s the real treasure! Gems and coins and jewels ain’t it. Money is worthless. Cool statues, man, that’s the sweet life.

Rand finds out that Mat swiped a lavish dagger from Shadar Logoth and insists that Mordeth didn’t offer it to him, so it’s not tainted. Rand agrees to keep Mat’s secret; they can possibly barter it for gems or coins or jewels in Tar Valon. Or statues. What have you.

Out of nowhere, Rand decides to climb the mast without even realizing he’s doing it. The whole crew stares up at him; Thom climbs up to convince him to come down. Once realization sets in, Rand fears he’s going mad.

It’s probably just scurvy. They ain’t got no lemons.