Golfo Placido, because never a strong wind had been known to blow upon
its waters.

On crossing the imaginary line drawn from Punta Mala to Azuera the
ships from Europe bound to Sulaco lose at once the strong breezes of the
ocean. They become the prey of capricious airs that play with them for
thirty hours at a stretch sometimes. Before them the head of the calm
gulf is filled on most days of the year by a great body of motionless
and opaque clouds. On the rare clear mornings another shadow is cast
upon the sweep of the gulf. The dawn breaks high behind the towering
and serrated wall of the Cordillera, a clear-cut vision of dark peaks
rearing their steep slopes on a lofty pedestal of forest rising from the
very edge of the shore. Amongst them the white head of Higuerota rises
majestically upon the blue. Bare clusters of enormous rocks sprinkle
with tiny black dots the smooth dome of snow.

Then, as the midday sun withdraws from the gulf the shadow of the
mountains, the clouds begin to roll out of the lower valleys. They
swathe in sombre tatters the naked crags of precipices above the wooded
slopes, hide the peaks, smoke in stormy trails across the snows of
Higuerota. The Cordillera is gone from you as if it had dissolved itself
into great piles of grey and black vapours that travel out slowly to
seaward and vanish into thin air all along the front before the blazing
heat of the day. The wasting edge of the cloud-bank always strives for,
but seldom wins, the middle of the gulf. The sun--as the sailors say--is
eating it up. Unless perchance a sombre thunder-head breaks away from
the main body to career all over the gulf till it escapes into the
offing beyond Azuera, where it bursts suddenly into flame and crashes
like a sinster pirate-ship of the air, hove-to above the horizon,
engaging the sea.

At night the body of clouds advancing higher up the sky smothers the
whole quiet gulf below with an impenetrable darkness, in which the sound
of the falling showers can be heard beginning and ceasing abruptly--now
here, now there. Indeed, these cloudy nights are proverbial with the
seamen along the whole west coast of a great continent. Sky, land, and
sea disappear together out of the world when the Placido--as the saying
is--goes to sleep under its black poncho. The few stars left below the
seaward frown of the vault shine feebly as into the mouth of a black
cavern. In its vastness your ship floats unseen under your feet, her