Chapter II

Morning: the second day. The sea is an extraordinary blue,--looks to me something like violet ink. Close by the ship, where the foam-clouds are, it is beautifully mottled,--looks like blue marble with exquisite veinings and nebulosities... Tepid wind, and cottony white clouds,--cirri climbing up over the edge of the sea all around. The sky is still pale blue, and the horizon is full of a whitish haze.

... A nice old French gentleman from Guadeloupe presumes to say this is not blue water;--he declares it greenish (_verdâtre_). Because I cannot discern the green, he tells me I do not yet know what blue water is. _Attendez un peu!_...

... The sky tone deepens as the sun ascends,--deepens deliciously. The warm wind proves soporific. I drop asleep with the blue light in my face,--the strong bright blue of the noonday sky. As I doze it seems to burn like a cold fire right through my eyelids. Waking up with a start, I fancy that everything is turning blue, myself included. "Do you not call this the real tropical blue?" I cry to my French fellow-traveller. "_Mon Dieu! non_," he exclaims, as in astonishment at the question;--"this is not blue!"... What can be his idea of blue, I wonder!

Clots of sargasso float by,--light-yellow sea-weed. We are nearing the Sargasso-sea,--entering the path of the trade-winds. There is a long ground-swell, the steamer rocks and rolls, and the tumbling water always seems to me growing bluer; but my friend from Guadeloupe says that this color "which I call blue" is only darkness--only the shadow of prodigious depth.

Nothing now but blue sky and what I persist in calling blue sea. The clouds have melted away in the bright glow. There is no sign of life in the azure gulf above, nor in the abyss beneath;--there are no wings or fins to be seen. Towards evening, under the slanting gold light, the color of the sea deepens into ultramarine; then the sun sinks down behind a bank of copper-colored cloud.