A TROPICAL CALM AND SUNSET.
IT was during a voyage from London to Melbourne that the scene we are to describe was beheld. We had passed Madeira, an azure island of faery, veiled in the golden haze of early dawn, its lofty peaks " islanded" by clouds. Towards evening, a few days afterwards, we had sighted Teneriffe, a hundred miles to the eastward. Its base—indeed, much more than its base—was completely hidden, and from this side it appeared not as a peak, but as an enormous ridge; its crest heaved up thirteen thousand feet into the sky. For a long time it was mistaken by every one, though all were on the look-out; for a long, narrow cloud. Broken, transverse lines— in reality, huge ravines in the mountain-side, in which the snow had not melted—seemed to be prominent parts of the cloud, catching the sunlight. Here we got fairly into the North-East trades, and for several weeks afterwards we sailed under a sky and upon a sea which were the ordinary sky and sea of the trade-winds. Both are, in colour, of an intense Prussian-blue, the sky being scarcely lighter or brighter than the sea. Under the influence of the strong, steady breeze, the sea is everywhere raised into brisk waves, each with its crest of foam, never sluggish and never boisterous. White, gleaming clouds, like thick discs of cotton-wool, some round, but most of them oval, and all at one moderate height, fleet across the sky without rest, but without haste. They are distributed as regularly as the spots on a leopard's skin, but there is a much greater proportional distance between them. The wind blows so constantly in absolutely the same direction, that sometimes for days together it is not necessary to trim the sails or touch a rope, except, perhaps, once in twenty-four hours to haul in the " slack," or amount by which ropes that bear the principal strains have stretched. By unusual good- luck, when the North-East trades began to fail, other favour- ing breezes carried us right through the doldrums—the Equatorial Zone, in which calms are to be expected—until we found the South-East trades, with which we sailed, in the same delightful manner as before, till, having passed the great shoulder which Brazil obtrudes into the South Atlantic, we had crossed the seventeenth parallel of South latitude. Here for some days we were becalmed. We had been expecting in a day or two to sight the now deserted island of Trinidada, whose latitude and longitude are, roughly, 20 South by 30 West ; but now, instead of sailing from a hundred knots a day— a very bad day's run—to two hundred and twenty or thirty, which is a good one for the trades, we began not to sail at all, but to drift helplessly in some weak eddy, as it seemed, of the great Brazilian current, from fifteen to forty miles a day. We were more than five hundred miles from the coast, and quite possibly nearly as far from any other ship. It may surprise those unaccustomed to the ocean to read that one of the worst things to be endured in a calm is portentous rolling. Every few minutes a succession of surges, larger than ordinary, came sweeping by. The ship, having no canvas drawing to steady her, was easily swayed from side to side, and
would begin to roll in the most abandoned manner, to the con- fusion of every one when it occurred at meal-times, and the scattering of viands and crockery. If on deck, it was very advisable to hold on tight fo something fixed and stanch, until the rolling fit was over. When off Cape Finisterre, we had been hove to for five days in a bead gale, and though the rolling was bad enough then, it was even worse during the calm. Neverthe- less, though the ocean swell never died away—for it never does die away—the surface of the deep-blue water was un- broken by a single ripple. It was like a sea of oil for smoothness, and there was not only not enough wind to stir the drooping sails, but there was not even enough to waft a paper- boat. After the calm had lasted several days, there was a ring all round the ship, perhaps a third of a mile or more in diameter, formed by empty bottles, wooden barrels and cases, and other flotsam and jetsam, clearly showing how absolutely windless was the atmosphere. The sea, notwithstanding its intense colour, was so clear, that when a broken white plate was thrown over- board, we could watch it as it went down, slicing from side to side through the water, and glinting as it caught the light, for an immense distance, probably fifty fathoms. One afternoon some of us lowered a boat to bathe. When we had got a little ahead of the ship, we could see every spar and rope reflected beneath her. The reflection was so perfect, that a water-colour sketch of her that was painted in the boat might be looked at upside down for some moments before the mistake was discovered. Towards sundown, after we had returned on board, a small shark made its appearance. "He smells the blood of an English- man," said an experienced traveller. " A shark's sure to come after any one has been overboard." Curiously enough, he was the first and the only one that we saw throughout the voyage. Some one suggested as an explanation of the modern scarcity of sharks in most parts of the deep sea, that steamers have frightened them away inshore. The skipper explained that "they've gone into the Atlantic cattle trade." On every passage across the Atlantic, it seems that two or three carcases at least are thrown overboard. The cattle are tethered athwart the ship, with their heads outwards, and not being able or sen- sible enough to steady themselves as the ship rolls, they pitch forward, and striking their heads against the side, break their necks. As many as two hundred have been killed in this way on board a single ship daring a gale. But we must not forget the sunset.
The day had been very cloudy. The stormy-petrels, that had joined us two days after leaving Teneriffe, and had followed the ship ever since, had deserted us with the wind. Here and there a " Portuguese man-of-war "—a poisonous medusa— hoisted its tiny sail or standard of transparent, iridescent film. Occasionally flying-fish, chased by their enemies, skimmed by us in 'parabolic curves, sometimes more than a hundred yards long, but never rising more than about fifteen feet above the water. Now and again a shoal of lazy grampuses come puffing past the ship, awkwardly shouldering their way through the water. A whale, or, rather, the fountain' of spray that it sends up, has been seen several times far in the offing. Late in the afternoon, a shoal of porpoises, half a mile or more away on our beam, begin to disport themselves in a most extraordinary manner. The calm seems to have filled them with life and frolic spirits. They play and roll about incessantly in one spot with the utmost liveliness, turning somersaults, and making long, arching bounds. Often they shoot straight up into the air to a height that seems quite equal to three times their own length, a height that is fully fifteen feet, and then tarn at the summit of their leap and dive straight down again. Except for their gambols, the broad expanse of deep-blue sea stretches unbroken in every direction to the farthest horizon. Such is the scene as the sun begins to set.
While he is still some fifteen or twenty degrees above the horizon, we are premonished by a few red flakes, like scales of a fish rubbed off by the finger, and golden scintillas in the West, and by the general disposition of the clouds, and the silver edges of some, to expect a glorious sunset. The whole Eastern half of the sky, from the horizon upwards, is wrapped in a thick woolly mantle of dark-grey ; but at perhaps thirty degrees beyond the zenith its continuity is broken by an interval of clear sky, and it forms roughly an arch or proscenium, already "with sun-fire garlanded," for the arena from which we are soon to witness the exit of the sun. From this break westwards, the clouds are dispersed in all the infinite variety of form and texture which painters never paint, and words can only slightly indicate. Long, fleecy scrolls, tier behind tier, their borders and volutes here and there frayed into fringes and tassels, lie across the sky at a great height, and extend " far, deep, and motionless," in diminishing bulk with distance, towards the westering sun. Towards the horizon, the clouds are spread in broad bands and thin strips, with small, rounded masses floating above and in front. In all directions, and at many different levels, are a multitude of clouds of wonderful diversity and delicacy of form. The sun is beginning to issue from the cloudy pavilion in which he has spent the day. Dark, impervious banks are piled up from the horizon on each side, like curved mountain-ridges crowned with gigantic towers and battlements of a Titanic fortification. Already pennons and streamers of gold and vermilion are dis- played above them, and from cloudy crag and turret beacon- -fires are blazing to summon out the hosts of airy pensioners refulgent, clad in the shining liveries of their regent and pro- genitor. Every moment the splendour grows, we cannot tell how. The light diaphanous clouds soon become wholly dyed in effluent streams of light. Far above all other clouds in the azure depths of sky between them, nets of dappled gauze and lace-like veils of lawn, before too fine for sight, now first reveal themselves in spangles of bright gold. The rose hues tinging the prominences of the darker clouds become intenser and more diffused. Flakes, streaming like leaves upon the autumn wind, change as we look, as if by the process of the season, from pale gold to mellow -crimson ; while beaded strips of grey mist are transmuted into carcanets of burning carbuncle. The sun pours forth an ever-widening flood of light. About the confines of the clear blue spaces marvellous shades of green and lilac expand them- selves, and faster than we mark them, new hues blush out, and fresh regions of the sky " blossom in purple " and gold. The transparency of most of the clouds wherever the fire touches them is almost as remarkable as the colour. As they become illuminated, the distinctness of their markings also is greatly enhanced. Mottled clouds become thickly covered with golden scales ; long trains, crossed with ribs of light and shade like a zebra's side, become barred with alternate stripes of ruby and light flame-colour; some tracts remind us of draughts of mackerel dying in the sun, maculis auro squalentibus ardens, while other downy expanses, lying in spreading wavelets and ripples, like rounded overlapping feathers on a sea-bird's breast, .are flecked with ruddy streaks and drops, like the torn bosom of a pelican in her piety. Nebulous fronds and plumes, stray filaments of gossamer and webs of misty lawn, -twining wisps and flossy curling wreaths, angular patches that gleam like the gorget of a humming-bird, streaming flocks, and tresses "like the bright hair uplifted from the head of some fierce Maenad," tapering sword-like spikes turning every way like the cherub's flaming brand,—these, and clouds of countless other forms are soon but almost imperceptibly imbued, not, as it seems, from without, but as if by fire kindling within them- selves, with flaming colour, gold and violet, scarlet, carnation, and crimson. Whilst we speak, the hues. of every part alter continually with ravishing changes. Ever as the mighty orb goes down, they are " growing and glowing " until their in- tensity passes description or conception. All the West has become a vast screen of crimson, with tossing waves of golden fire, before and above which the nearer clouds, now mostly themselves all red, permeated and made transparent by "the inmost purple spirit of light," lie like the crowded islands of an aerial archipelago. Ere long, everything is steeped in colours of a hundred or a ‘thousand tints, all ineffably beautiful. Where the sun pierces
the clouds and throws his level rays along the waves, there is little but white light, relieved by a few rosy blushes on the water ; to the North and South, the sea still remains deep-blue ; from the horizon half-way up toward the zenith, and spreading -on either side almost into a semi-circle, is the broad sheet of blood-red flame ; elsewhere, every imaginable gradation of pure colour is represented, from the most delicate primrose and saffron, shading imperceptibly through all colours of the rain- bow to the dark-purple of the pansy and the deep black-red of the damask-rose,—and all is living fire.
When the spell fails for a moment to- enthral our eyes, we look round, and behold in Eastern sea and sky a page'int hardly
less magnificent. The great clouds that -completely shroud the heaven in billowy pomp have everywhere assumed a tinge of lurid magenta. As we watch, the fleecy woof is bathed in an ever-deepening tint of splendid colour, pouring forth from the great source of light. More wondrous still, on this side, where our eyes escape the overpowering light in the West, the ocean reflecting as in a dull mirror the gorgeous colour above, glows like a sea of liquid amethyst.
As we turn again and survey the whole scene around, we find no part of the vault of heaven that is not "deluged with fire." The tremulous air, throughout its total space, is all aflame, as with tethereal lava from a volcano of the air. The ship, also, floating moveless in the midst, with tall masts and drooping sails, becomes itself transfigured by the all-involving splendour. It may be well believed that the pale cast of thought is for the time eclipsed within no, that the self-conscious in- tellect and its reflections are transmuted by the potent alchemy into the pure gold of an ecstasy almost impersonal. The marvellous splendour before our eyes receives a crown of spiritual mystery as we hear the whisper :—" For you alone, for seventy souls out of all the thousand millions of the earth, in the secrecy of the inviolate ocean, has this epiphany of supernal glory been majestically unfolded !"
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