CHAPTER XVI.
They Are Becalmed On the eighth day there was a calm.
It came on by night: so that waking at daybreak, and folding my arms over the gunwale, I looked out upon a scene very hard to describe.
The sun was still beneath the horizon; perhaps not yet out of sight from the plains of Paraguay.

But the dawn was too strong for the stars; which, one by one, had gone out, like waning lamps after a ball.
Now, as the face of a mirror is a blank, only borrowing character from what it reflects; so in a calm in the Tropics, a colorless sky overhead, the ocean, upon its surface, hardly presents a sign of existence.

The deep blue is gone; and the glassy element lies tranced; almost viewless as the air.
But that morning, the two gray firmaments of sky and water seemed collapsed into a vague ellipsis.

And alike, the Chamois seemed drifting in the atmosphere as in the sea.

Every thing was fused into the calm: sky, air, water, and all.