He had adapted himself to all incoming and outgoing angles just as the body of the mollusk adapts itself to the winding curves of its shells.

The cabin seemed formed by the secretions of his being.

It was a covering, a sheath, that went with him from one extreme of the ocean to the other, heating itself with the high temperature of the tropics, or becoming as cosy as an Esquimo hut on approaching the polar seas.
His love for it was somewhat like that which the friar has for his cell; but this cell was a secular one, and entering it after a tempestuous night on the bridge, or a trip ashore in most curious and foreign ports, he found it always the same, with his papers and books untouched on the table, his clothes hanging from their hooks, his photographs fixed on the walls.

The daily spectacle of seas and lands was always changing--the temperature, the course of the stars, and the people that one week were bundled up in winter greatcoats, and were clad in white the week after, hunting the heavens for the new stars of another hemisphere....

Yet his cozy little stateroom was always the same, as though it were the corner of a planet apart, unaffected by the variations of this world.
Upon awaking in it, he found himself every morning enwrapped in a greenish and bland atmosphere as though he might have been sleeping in the bottom of an enchanted lake.