By the time that all this had been accomplished, the wind had fallen away to a dead calm, and the only sounds audible were the creaking and groaning of the ship's timbers, the loud rattle of the cabin doors below upon their hooks, the wash of the sea alongside and under the counter, the constant irritating _jerk-jerk_ of the tiller chains, and the violent rustle and slatting of the staysails, as the _Dolphin_ rolled her channels under in the long, oily swell that was now running. But, so far as the aspect of the sky was concerned, there was no more sign of the threatened storm than there had been when I first went on deck that morning--except that, maybe, the haze had thickened somewhat, rendering our horizon still more circumscribed, and the heat had increased to such an extent that, as Keene had remarked, one would gladly have gone overboard to escape it but for the sharks, several of which were cruising round us, while three monsters persistently hung under our counter in the shadow of the ship's hull, hungrily ogling those of us who chanced to lean over the taffrail to get a glimpse of them. Yet, when, for want of something better to do, Jack Keene and I got a shark hook and, baiting it with a highly flavoured piece of pork out of the harness cask, sought to inveigle one of the monsters into swallowing it, they disdained to even so much as look at it, merely glancing upward at us, when we deftly dropped the bait upon one of their broad, shovel noses, as though to say: "No, no, my hearties! No rancid pork for us, thank you, when, by exercising a little patience, we may, with luck, get a chance to learn what one of you jokers tastes like." The enervating effect of the heat seemed to be as strongly revealed in them as it was in ourselves. The sun still flamed in the heavens when, shortly before noon, Jack and I brought our sextants on deck with the object of measuring his meridian altitude above the horizon; but we were only able to obtain a very approximate and wholly useless result, for, when we came to try, we found that the sun appeared in our instruments merely as a shapeless glare of light, while the horizon was wholly indistinguishable. Then, by imperceptible degrees, the sun, like the horizon, became obliterated, and the atmosphere stealthily darkened, as though a continuous succession of curtains of grey gauze were being interposed between us and the sky. Meanwhile the barometer was still persistently declining, although not quite so rapidly as during the early hours of the morning.