Though few things are more wonderful than those vast rivers of air and water, pouring always in the same direction, century after century, they are perhaps less impressive from a man’s point of view than many a mere whirling eddy, which flings itself along, rousing a huge flurry of water, and soon dying out of existence. A man cannot grasp as a whole the Trades or the Roaring Forties, with their companion ocean rivers. Practically he knows only that little portion of each which happens to be near his ship. If he is overtaken by a hurricane, the whole life of which is compressed into a few miles of space and a few hours of time, he feels a greater awe. Small wonder that he should. Those impetuous and short-lived eddies are terrible in their fury. Their winds blow with a fierceness never approached by the stiffest Trade. A hurricane, tearing over Earth’s surface at the rate of one hundred and twenty miles an hour, reduces the most muscular of men to helplessness. None the less, such a hurricane is in itself a mere accident, a mere passing incident, a mere swirl of air, coming into being to adjust a lost balance, and vanishing so soon as its work is done. We have seen tiny swirls of air dancing along the road, on a windy day, sweeping up bits of straw or dried leaves into their embrace. Such little swirls are hurricanes in miniature. The real thing levels forests, wrecks towns, lashes the ocean into mountainous heights of water, sinks gallant ships, destroys human lives. Yet the little swirl and the hurricane are closely akin. Only in recent years has the circular--more strictly, the oval--shape of a hurricane become known. It may be described as a revolving eddy of air, the winds pouring in a corkscrew-like fashion round the centre, inwards from without, and upwards from within. Another kind of air-eddy, called an anti-cyclone, gyrates just the other way, downward and outward. This usually brings light winds and dry weather, instead of storms and rain. One might imagine that in the centre of a wild cyclone a ship could find safety, because there calm reigns. But the furious whirl of winds all around raises tumultuous billows; and towards the centre, although the winds themselves die down, the state of the sea is a perfect “chaos” of tempestuous waves converging from all sides. Sailors strive their utmost to avoid that central chaos. CHAPTER VIII. AN OCEAN OF AZURE “The boom of the waves on the shingle.”--LEWIS MORRIS. “Roll on, thou deep and dark-blue Ocean, roll!”--BYRON. Not that the Ocean is always and everywhere blue. In a certain “arm of the sea,” the Bristol Channel, it is commonly any tint that you please rather than blue--brown, green, yellow, chocolate, only not the colour that we love. If by chance it dons for a few hours a robe of azure, that robe is merely a passing loan from the sky. And in dull weather it can only be described as a huge puddle of muddy liquid.