ted him to penetrate a
little into the mysteries of the oceanic immensity, severe and dark,
that for ancient peoples had been "the night of the abyss," "the sea of
utter darkness," "the blue dragon that daily swallows the sun."

He no longer regarded Father Ocean as the capricious and tyrannical god
of the poets. Everything in his depths was working with a vital
regularity, subject to the general laws of existence. Even the tempests
roared within prescribed and charted quadrangles.

The fresh trade-winds pushed the bark toward the Southeast, maintaining
a heavenly serenity in sky and sea. Before the prow hissed the silken
wings of flying fish, spreading out in swarms, like little squadrons of
diminutive aeroplanes.

Over the masts and yards covered with canvas, the albatross, eagles of
the Atlantic desert, traced their long, sweeping circles, flashing
across the purest blue their great, sail-like wings. From time to time
the boat would meet floating prairies, great fields of seaweed
dislodged from the Sargasso Sea. Enormous tortoises drowsed in the
midst of these clumps of gulf-weed, serving as islands of repose to the
seagulls perched on their shells. Some of the seaweeds were green,
nourished by the luminous water of the surface; others had the reddish
color of the deep where enters only the deadly chill of the last rays
of the sun. Like fruits of the oceanic prairies, there floated past
close bunches of dark grapes, leathery capsules filled with brackish
water.

As they approached the equator, the breeze kept falling and falling,
and the atmosphere became suffocating in the extreme. It was the zone
of calms, the ocean of dark, oily waters, in which boats remained for
entire weeks with sails limp, without the slightest breath rippling the
atmosphere.

Clouds the color of pit coal reflected the ship's slow progress over
the sea; showers of rain like whipcord occasionally lashed the deck,
followed by a flaming sun that was soon blotted out by a new downpour.
These clouds, pregnant with cataracts, this night descending upon the
full daylight of the Atlantic, had been the terror of the ancients, and
yet, thanks to just such phenomena, the sailors could pass from one
hemisphere to another without the light wounding them to death, or the
sea scorching them like a burning glass. The heat of the equator,
raising up the water in steam, had formed a band of shade around the
earth. From other worlds it must appear like a g