Aloft, in Yves' domain, might still be felt some slow movements which were no longer perceptible below. In this motionless air saturated with rays, the crow's nest continued to rock with a tranquil regularity which conduced to slumber. There were long slow oscillations accompanied always by the same flappings of drooping sails, the same creakings of dry wood. It was intensely hot, and the light had a surprising splendour, and the mournful sea was of a milky blue, of the colour of melted turquoise. But when the strange dense clouds, which travelled low so as almost to touch the water, passed over us, they brought us night and drenched us with a deluge of rain. We were now directly under the Equator; and it seemed that there was no breath of air there to carry us forward. They lasted for hours, sometimes for a whole day, this darkness and these tropical storms. Then Yves and his friends assumed a uniform which they called the "uniform of savages," and sat them down, all heedless, under the warm downpour and let it rain as it would. And then suddenly the weather changed. The black curtain of clouds drew slowly away, continuing its sluggish progress, over the turquoise coloured sea; and the splendid light reappeared more astonishing than ever after the darkness; and the powerful equatorial sun proceeded to drink up very quickly all this water that had been poured upon us; the sails, the woodwork of the ship, the awnings recovered their whiteness in the sunshine; the _Sibylle_ in its entirety took on once more its normal clear colour in the midst of the vast blue monotony which stretched everywhere around. Looking down from the top in which Yves lived, one saw that this blue world was without limit, that its clear depths were without end. One felt that the horizon, the last line of the waters, was a great distance away, although it did not differ at all from the immediate surroundings, having always the same clearness, always the same colour, always the same mirror-like polish. And one realized then the _roundness_ of the earth, which alone set a limit to the vision. At the hour of sunset there were in the air kinds of vaults formed of successions of tiny golden clouds; they were repeated, in diminishing perspective, until they almost disappeared in the empty distance; one followed them to the point of vertigo; they were like the naves of Apocalyptic temples having no end. And the air was so clear that it needed the horizon of the sea to shut out the vista of these depths of the sky; the last little golden clouds formed as it were a tangent to the line of the waters, and seemed, in their remoteness, as delicate as the finest of hatching.