The Argo expedition

The Argo expedition is a children’s imaginative game whose hazards and rescues unfold with the force of a real voyage. It begins after a game proposed by one boy has broken down in squabbling; when Momo arrives, the children’s play takes off. They imagine an expedition aboard a research ship, face a giant jellyfish and a monstrous waterspout, and turn a threatening thunderstorm into the setting for collective courage. The adventure makes visible the special quality of Momo’s company: she does not need to supply a stream of ingenious ideas. Her presence is enough for the children to begin inventing together.

From a stalled game to an expedition

The children had been waiting for Momo at the Amphitheater while dark clouds gathered overhead. One girl, there with her little sister, was frightened by thunder and lightning and wanted to go home. Before Momo returned from a nearby stroll, a boy had suggested that they play girl sailors aboard a ship of the future. The idea sounded promising, but when the children tried it, they began to quarrel and soon sat waiting again. Momo’s arrival marks the abrupt reversal: instead of arguing over the premise, they enter a shared story.

Their ship is the Argo, a research vessel steaming towards the South Coral Sea, a stretch of water imagined as crowded with shoals, reefs, and mysterious sea monsters. Its most feared danger is the Travelling Tornado, a roaming waterspout with an unpredictable route, powerful enough to reduce any ship caught in its grasp to matchwood. The Argo has been designed to meet this threat: its hull is made of adamantium, a steel described as both tough and flexible, and cast in one piece without rivets or welded seams. The children’s premise gives the expedition a clear purpose and a danger against which their invented ship can be tested.

The rescue in the South Coral Sea

The journey becomes a rescue when three girl sailors, all imagined as world-famous scuba divers in wetsuits, plunge overboard to investigate a strange specimen. Sandra surfaces to report that the creature is a giant jellyfish and that the other two divers are trapped in its tentacles. Commander Franco and his frogmen return to the ship, and Jim Ironside orders the Argo to attack the monster. The ship reverses briefly, then charges at full speed. Its razor-sharp bow cuts the jellyfish in half, with Jim steering between the entangled girls so precisely that the maneuver frees them without harming them.

The rescue is a narrow success, not a pause in the danger. The crew has been so occupied that they have forgotten to watch the sea; only at the last moment do they see the Travelling Tornado racing towards them. An immense roller tosses the Argo into the air, turns it onto its side, and sends it plunging into a watery abyss. The imagined crew remains steady under the assault: Captain Gordon stands on the bridge, and his sailors are not paralyzed by fear. Momosan, described as unused to storm-tossed seas, is the sole person to take refuge in a lifeboat. The sequence makes the game’s adventure depend on successive changes of peril: saving the divers exposes the ship to a greater threat.

Singing the tornado to sleep

After the Argo reaches the storm’s innermost eye, the children imagine a vast figure gyrating above a sea flattened by the storm’s force. The professor identifies it as a Teetotum elasticum. Momosan then conveys that her tribe has an ancient song which can send the Travelling Tornado to sleep, if someone is brave enough to sing to it. Jim Ironside doubts that singing can affect a tornado, while Sarah asks whether the idea is scientifically feasible. The captain decides that trying can do no harm and tells the professor to ask Momosan to continue.

Momosan sings a peculiar refrain of a few repeated notes, clapping and dancing as she goes. One by one, the others join her, until the whole crew is singing, clapping, and moving to the music. The scene’s decisive change is from a crew confronting overwhelming force to a crew acting in unison: the song becomes both their response to the tornado and a shared performance. The waterspout slows, stops rotating, and sinks beneath the waves. The storm ends with it; rain ceases, the sky clears, and the waves subside until the Argo rests on a glittering, calm sea. Captain Gordon praises the crew and says he is proud of them.

The real storm and the game’s ending

The thunderstorm outside the game has continued while the children have been sailing through its imagined counterpart. The girl who had feared the thunder realizes she is soaked, and that she had forgotten to be frightened while aboard the Argo. The children spend time discussing their voyage and exchanging personal experiences before saying goodbye and going home to dry off. The real weather has not vanished; instead, it has been incorporated into a story that changes how the children experience it.

One boy, the child who wears glasses, remains dissatisfied with the ending because the Teetotum elasticum has been sunk. He regrets losing the chance to examine what he considers the last surviving specimen of its kind. His response preserves a different kind of investment in the adventure: even the defeat of the danger can disappoint a player who wants to know more about its marvelous creature. The children otherwise agree that their games with Momo are more fun than any others. The expedition gives that judgment its substance: Momo’s presence helps turn a faltering proposal into a sustained story, makes room for different kinds of contribution, and draws the group into an adventure whose ending belongs to them all.