We were in open sea again, out of sight of land from the mast-head, steering for somewhere about north-north-east, with a very light breeze from nearly the monsoon quarter, and sometimes a flying squall, sometimes no more than a black pour of rain, that left it hotter than before. The clear deep blue of the Indian ocean got to a sickly heavy sort of dead colour towards noon, like the bottoms of old bottles, and still we were standing on without signs of land, when, almost all at once, I noticed the water in the shadow of the schooner had a brown coffee-like tint I had never exactly seen hitherto; indeed, by the afternoon, it was the same hue to the very horizon, with a clean seaboard on all sides. I had the deep-sea lead-line hove at length, and found no soundings with a hundred and fifty fathoms; there was neither land nor river, I knew, for hundreds and hundreds of miles to the coast of Arabia; as for current, no trial I could think of showed any; and there were now and then patches of small glittering sea-jellies and sea-lice to be seen amongst a stalk or two of weed on the soft heave of the water, going the way of the breeze. A dozen or so of Portuguese men-of-war, as they call them, held across our bows one time; little pink blubbers, with their long shining roots seen hanging down in the clear of the surface, and their little blue gauze sails with the light through them, ribbed like leaves of trees, as they kept before the wind. Westwood and I both fancied we could feel a queer sulphury smell as we leant over the side, when a surge came along the bends. Not a single fish was to be seen about us, either, except the long big black-fish that rose one after the other at a distance, as the wind got lighter. One while you heard them groaning and gasping in the half-calm, as if it were the breathing of the sea far and wide every time it swelled; another, one saw them in a cluster of black points against the bright sky-line, like so many different-shaped rocks with the foam round them, or a lot of long-boats floating bottom up, with their back-horns for humps on the keel. As for Jones, he looked graver and graver, till all of a sudden we saw him go below; but after a little he came up with an almanac in his hand, and his finger fixed where the time of the next new moon was given, as I found when I took it from him, for he seemed not inclined to speak. "Why, what has that to do with the thing?" I said; "we are heading fair for the Minicoy cluster, I think." "Yes, sir," said he; "if one needed anything to prove that, he has only to look at the sea--at this season, I _knew_ how it would turn out." "Well, that's what I can't understand, Mr Jones," said I; "the water seems as deep as St Paul's Cathedral thrice over!" "Do you not know then, sir, why that island is called--what it is?" was the answer,--"but wait--wait--till _night_!" and with that Jones turned round to the bulwarks, leaning his arms on the rail. In