nner restores your equanimity--dinner with the
soft, warm tropic air breathing through all the wide-open ports; the
electric fans drumming busily; the men all in clean white; the ladies,
the very few precious ladies, in soft, low gowns. After dinner the deck,
as near cool as it will be, and heads bare to the breeze of our
progress, and glowing cigars. At ten or eleven o'clock the groups begin
to break up, the canvas chairs to empty. Soon reappears a pyjamaed
figure followed by a steward carrying a mattress. This is spread, under
its owner's direction, in a dark corner forward. With a sigh you in your
turn plunge down into the sweltering inferno of your cabin, only to
reappear likewise with a steward and a mattress. The latter, if you are
wise, you spread where the wind of the ship's going will be full upon
you. It is a strong wind and blows upon you heavily, so that the sleeves
and legs of your pyjamas flop, but it is a soft, warm wind, and beats
you as with muffled fingers. In no temperate clime can you ever enjoy
this peculiar effect of a strong breeze on your naked skin without even
the faintest surface chilly sensation. So habituated has one become to
feeling cooler in a draught that the absence of chill lends the night an
unaccustomedness, the more weird in that it is unanalyzed, so that one
feels definitely that one is in a strange, far country. This is
intensified by the fact that in these latitudes the moon, the great,
glorious, calm tropical moon, is directly overhead--follows the centre
line of the zenith--instead of being, as with us in our temperate zone,
always more or less declined to the horizon. This, too, lends the night
an exotic quality, the more effective in that at first the reason for it
is not apprehended.

A night in the tropics is always more or less broken. One awakens, and
sleeps again. Motionless white-clad figures, cigarettes glowing, are
lounging against the rail looking out over a molten sea. The moonlight
lies in patterns across the deck, shivering slightly under the throb of
the engines, or occasionally swaying slowly forward or slowly back as
the ship's course changes, but otherwise motionless, for here the sea is
always calm. You raise your head, look about, sprawl in a new position
on your mattress, fall asleep. On one of these occasions you find
unexpectedly that the velvet-gray night has become steel-gray dawn, and
that the kindly old quartermaster is bending over you. Sleepily, very