the sledges of the
Esquimaux backwards in the snow. Other winds burn. The simoon of Africa
is the typhoon of China and the samiel of India. Simoon, typhoon, and
samiel, are believed to be the names of demons. They descend from the
heights of the mountains. A storm vitrified the volcano of Toluca. This
hot wind, a whirlwind of inky colour, rushing upon red clouds, is
alluded to in the Vedas: "Behold the black god, who comes to steal the
red cows." In all these facts we trace the presence of the electric
mystery.

The wind indeed is full of it; so are the waves. The sea, too, is
composite in its nature. Under its waves of water which we see, it has
its waves of force which are invisible. Its constituents are
innumerable. Of all the elements the ocean is the most indivisible and
the most profound.

Endeavour to conceive this chaos so enormous that it dwarfs all other
things to one level. It is the universal recipient, reservoir of germs
of life, and mould of transformations. It amasses and then disperses, it
accumulates and then sows, it devours and then creates. It receives all
the waste and refuse waters of the earth, and converts them into
treasure. It is solid in the iceberg, liquid in the wave, fluid in the
estuary. Regarded as matter, it is a mass; regarded as a force, it is an
abstraction. It equalises and unites all phenomena. It may be called the
infinite in combination. By force and disturbance, it arrives at
transparency. It dissolves all differences, and absorbs them into its
own unity. Its elements are so numerous that it becomes identity. One of
its drops is complete, and represents the whole. From the abundance of
its tempests, it attains equilibrium. Plato beheld the mazy dances of
the spheres. Strange fact, though not the less real, the ocean, in the
vast terrestrial journey round the sun, becomes, with its flux and
reflux, the balance of the globe.

In a phenomenon of the sea, all other phenomena are resumed. The sea is
blown out of a waterspout as from a syphon; the storm observes the
principle of the pump; the lightning issues from the sea as from the
air. Aboard ships dull shocks are sometimes felt, and an odour of
sulphur issues from the receptacles of chain cables. The ocean boils.
"The devil has put the sea in his cauldron," said De Ruyter. In certain
tempests, which characterise the equinoxes and the return to equilibrium
of the prolific power of nature, vessels breasting the foam seem to give