The Malabar lay on the water like a glow-worm on a floating leaf, and the glare of the signal-fire made no more impression on the darkness than the candle carried by a solitary miner would have made on the abyss of a coal-pit.
And yet the Malabar held two hundred creatures like themselves! The water over which the boats glided was black and smooth, rising into huge foamless billows, the more terrible because they were silent.

When the sea hisses, it speaks, and speech breaks the spell of terror; when it is inert, heaving noiselessly, it is dumb, and seems to brood over mischief.

The ocean in a calm is like a sulky giant; one dreads that it may be meditating evil.

Moreover, an angry sea looks less vast in extent than a calm one.

Its mounting waves bring the horizon nearer, and one does not discern how for many leagues the pitiless billows repeat themselves.