... It is the morning of the third day since we left Barbadoes, and for
the first time since entering tropic waters all things seem changed. The
atmosphere is heavy with strange mists; and the light of an
orange-colored sun, immensely magnified by vapors, illuminates a
greenish-yellow sea,--foul and opaque, as if stagnant.... I remember
just such a sunrise over the Louisiana gulf-coast.
We are in the shallows, moving very slowly. The line-caster keeps
calling, at regular intervals: "Quarter less five, sir! And a half four,
sir!"... There is little variation in his soundings--a quarter of a
fathom or half a fathom difference. The warm air has a sickly heaviness,
like the air of a swamp; the water shows olive and ochreous tones
alternately;--the foam is yellow in our wake. These might be the colors
of a fresh-water inundation....
A fellow-traveller tells me, as we lean over the rail, that this same
viscous, glaucous sea washes the great penal colony of Cayenne--which he
visited. When a convict dies there, the corpse, sewn up in a sack, is
borne to the water, and a great bell tolled. Then the still surface is
suddenly broken by fins innumerable,--black fins of sharks rushing to
the hideous funeral: they know the Bell!...
There is land in sight--very low land,--a thin dark line suggesting
marshiness; and the nauseous color of the water always deepens.
As the land draws near, it reveals a beautiful tropical appearance. The
sombre green line brightens color, sharpens into a splendid fringe of
fantastic evergreen fronds, bristling with palm crests. Then a mossy
sea-wall comes into sight--dull gray stone-work, green-lined at all its
joints. There is a fort. The steamer's whistle is exactly mocked by a
queer echo, and the cannon-shot once reverberated--only once: there are
no mountains here to multiply a sound. And all the while the water
becomes a thicker and more turbid green; the wake looks more and more
ochreous, the foam ropier and yellower. Vessels becalmed everywhere
speck the glass-level of the sea, like insects sticking upon a mirror.
It begins, all of a sudden, to rain torrentially; and through the white
storm of falling drops nothing is discernible.