For about a week we have been directly under the sun. When we came
under lat. 21° S. we could see nothing of our shadows at noon. Had
we been ignorant of the cause we might have been in a frame of mind
predisposing us to listen to German stories of a man’s selling his
shadow to the evil one: for what had become of ours? Had we been of
those ‘whose souls proud science never taught to stray far as the
solar walk or milky way,’ we imagined what our speculations on this
phenomenon would have been. One’s shadow certainly can never be less
than in 21° S. Under our feet there was to each of us something like
one of the clouds of Magellan.