The foam breaking against the prow sparkled like broken fragments of electric globes.
When it was absolutely tranquil and the ship remained immovable with drooping sail, the stars passing slowly from one side of the mast to the other, the delicate medusae, that the slightest wave was able to crush, would come to the surface floating on the waters, around the island of wood.

There were thousands of these umbrellas filing slowly by, green, blue, rose, with a vague coloring similar to oil-lights,--a Japanese procession seen from above, that on one side was lost in the mystery of the black waters and incessantly reappeared on the other side.
The young pilot loved navigation in a sailing ship,--the struggle with the wind, the solitude of its calms.

He was far nearer the ocean here than on the bridge of a transatlantic liner.

The bark did not beat the sea into such rabid foam.

It slipped discreetly along as in the maritime silence of the first millennium of the new-born earth.