Every one was on deck, running about in all directions, and making all sorts of signs of adieu, to the boats that were shoving off to return to shore. Hardly had we gone a league when I heard on all sides such exclamations as, "_Me mareo!_ I feel ill! some lemons; some rum; some vinegar; some smelling salts." The deck offered a most melancholy spectacle. The women, who but a short time previously had looked so lovely, were as green as bodies that had been immersed in the water for a week. They lay about on mattresses, boxes, and counterpanes, with a total forgetfulness of grace or modesty. A poor parrot, which was taken ill in its cage, and could not at all comprehend the agony it was suffering, poured forth its vocabulary with the most mournful and comic volubility. I was lucky enough not to be ill. The two days I had passed on board the _Voltigeur_ had no doubt hardened me. My companion, who was less fortunate than myself, plunged into the interior of the vessel, and did not reappear until we reached Gibraltar. How is it that modern science, which displays so much solicitude for rabbits who have got a cold in the head, and finds delight in dying duck's bones red, has not yet endeavoured to discover some remedy against this feeling of horrible uneasiness, which causes more suffering than actual acute pain? The sea was still rather rough, although the weather was magnificent; the air was so transparent that we could distinguish with tolerable distinctness the coast of Africa, Cape Spartel, and the bay at the bottom of which Tangiers is situated. That band of mountains resembling clouds, from which they differed only by their immovability, was then Africa, the land of prodigies, of which the Romans used to say, _quid novi fert Africa?_ the oldest continent in the world, the cradle of Eastern civilization, the centre of Islamism, the black world, where the shade which is absent from the sky is only found on the faces of the people, the mysterious laboratory of Nature, who, in her endeavours to bring forth man, first changes the monkey into a negro! What a refined and modern instance of the punishment of Tantalus was it merely to see Africa, and be obliged to pass on.