So we kept well out to the west, and fine sailing it was. For days we hardly touched a brace; the steady wind, growing daily warmer, sweetly blew the little brig along. It was the South Pacific Ocean. Many reports are there of the various tempers of that sea, but, for my part, northward of the parallel of forty degrees I have ever found it a gentle breast of ocean. Long and lazy was the blue swell brimming to our counter, drowsy the flap of the sunny canvas, soft the cradled motion of the ship. Once again the silver flying fish glanced from the slope of the violet knolls. The wet, black fin of a shark hung steadfast in our wake. What a world of waters it was! Never the gleam of a ship’s canvas for days and days to break the boundless continuity of the distant sea-line. The men relaxed their labors, Yan Bol took no notice, and I, who was never a “hazer,” was willing that they should lounge through their toil of the hours in a climate so enervating that one yearned to sling a hammock in some cool corner of the deck, to lie in it all day, to smoke and doze while the imagination slided away on the stream of the rippling music made by the broken waters and passed into the fairy harbors of dreams. “By this time to-morrow,” said Greaves to me one evening, “if this breeze holds, and our reckoning is true, and the island has not been exploded by a volcano or an earthquake, you will be having a good view of the ship in the cave--no, I am wrong, a good view of her you will not obtain from the sea, but you will be having a good view of the cave in which she lies, and I shall be very much surprised if you are not mightily impressed by the magnitude and beauty of that great hole or split in the rock, and by the indescribable complicated atmosphere or shadow within, caused, as I long ago explained to you, by the interlacery of the ship’s gear and spars, visible and indeterminable.” “Visible and indeterminable! Captain, you put it as though it were some mystery of religion.” “Do you object, Fielding,” said he, “to sailors, I mean quarter-deck sailors, expressing themselves as educated men would, nay, as average gentlemen would? Are you for keeping the quarter-deck sailor down to Smollett’s platform of Hatchway and Trunnion? Must we swear, must we drink, must we behave when ashore like lascivious baboons and at sea like Newgate felons, who have burst through the iron bars and are sailing away for their lives, merely to justify the landgoing notion that the best of all sailors are the most brutal of all beasts.” “I beg your pardon,” said I; “I meant nothing.” “Visible and indeterminable. Are they not good words? Do they not exactly express what I want to convey to your mind? How ‘der toyfell’ would you have me talk?”