Hardly had we lost sight of the brown and barren island and Las Palmas in her magpie suit, than we ran out of the Brisa Parda, or grey north-east Trade, into calm and cool Harmatan [Footnote: The word is of disputed origin. _Ahalabata_, or _ahalalata_, on the Gold Coast is a foreign term denoting the dry norther or north-easter that blows from January to March or April (Zimmerman). Christalier makes _haramata_, 'Spanish _harmatan_, an Arabic word.'] weather. We begrudged the voyage this lovely season, which should have been kept for the journey. After the damp warmth of Madeira the still and windless air felt dry, but not too dry; cold, but not too cold; decidedly fresh in early morning, and never warm except at 3 P.M. The sun was pale and shorn, as in England, seldom showing a fiery face before 10 A.M. or after 5 P.M. The sea at night appeared slightly milky, like the white waters so often seen off the western coast of India. Every traveller describes the Harmatan, and most travellers transcribe the errors touching the infusoria and their coats which Ehrenberg found at sea in the impalpable powder near the Cape Verde islands. The dry cold blast is purely local, not cosmical. There is a fine reddish-yellow sand in the lower air-strata; we see it, we feel it, and we know that it comes from the desert-tracts of northern Africa. The air rises _en masse_ from the Great Sahara; the vacuum is speedily filled by the heavier and cooler indraught from the north or south, and the higher strata form the upper current flowing from the Equator to the Poles. But 'siliceous dust' will not wholly account for the veiling of the sun and the opaqueness of the higher atmosphere. This arises simply from the want of humidity; the air is denser, and there is no vapour to refract and reflect the light-rays. Hence the haze which even in England appears to overhang the landscape when there is unusually droughty weather; and hence, conversely, as all know, the view is clearest before and after heavy showers, when the atmosphere is saturated or supersaturated.