d be past; the mild equatorial breeze
exchanged for cold, fierce squalls, and all the horrors of northern
voyaging.

I cast my eyes downward to the brown planks of the dull, plodding
ship, silent from stem to stern; then abroad.

In the distance what visions were spread! The entire western horizon
high piled with gold and crimson clouds; airy arches, domes, and
minarets; as if the yellow, Moorish sun were setting behind some vast
Alhambra. Vistas seemed leading to worlds beyond. To and fro, and all
over the towers of this Nineveh in the sky, flew troops of birds.
Watching them long, one crossed my sight, flew through a low arch,
and was lost to view. My spirit must have sailed in with it; for
directly, as in a trance, came upon me the cadence of mild billows
laving a beach of shells, the waving of boughs, and the voices of
maidens, and the lulled beatings of my own dissolved heart, all
blended together.

Now, all this, to be plain, was but one of the many visions one has
up aloft. But coming upon me at this time, it wrought upon me so,
that thenceforth my desire to quit the Arcturion became little short
of a frenzy.

CHAPTER II
A Calm

Next day there was a calm, which added not a little to my impatience
of the ship. And, furthermore, by certain nameless associations
revived in me my old impressions upon first witnessing as a landsman
this phenomenon of the sea. Those impressions may merit a page.

To a landsman a calm is no joke. It not only revolutionizes his
abdomen, but unsettles his mind; tempts him to recant his belief in
the eternal fitness of things; in short, almost makes an infidel of
him.

At first he is taken by surprise, never having dreamt of a state of
existence where existence itself seems suspended. He shakes himself
in his coat, to see whether it be empty or no. He closes his eyes, to
test the reality of the glassy expanse. He fetches a deep breath, by
way of experiment, and for the sake of witnessing the effect. If a
reader of books, Priestley on Necessity occurs to him; and he
believes in that old Sir Anthony Absolute to the very last chapter.
His faith in Malte Brun, however, begins to fail; for the geography,
which from boyhood he had implicitly confided in, always assured him,
that though expatiating all over the globe, the sea was at least
margined by land. That over against America, for example, was Asia.
But it is a calm, and he grows madly skeptical.

To his alarmed fancy, p