l
through regions which the telescope can but imperfectly explore. It
was difficult, therefore, to sit down to a book, or even to pursue any
necessary occupation unconnected with the actual conduct of the
vessel, with uninterrupted attention. My eyes, the only sense organs I
could employ, were constantly on the alert; but, of course, by far the
greater portion of my time passed without a single new object or
occasion of remark. That a journey so utterly without precedent or
parallel, in which so little could be anticipated or provided for,
through regions absolutely untraversed and very nearly unknown, should
be monotonous, may seem strange. But in truth the novelties of the
situation, such as they were, though intensely striking and
interesting, were each in turn speedily examined, realised, and, so to
speak, exhausted; and this once done, there was no greater occupation
to the mind in the continuance of strange than in that of familiar
scenery. The infinitude of surrounding blackness, filled as it were
with points of light more or less brilliant, when once its effects had
been scrutinised, and when nothing more remained to be noted, afforded
certainly a more agreeable, but scarcely a more interesting or
absorbing, outlook than the dead grey circle of sea, the dead grey
hemisphere of cloud, which form the prospect from the deck of a packet
in mid-Atlantic; while of change without or incident in the vessel
herself there was, of course, infinitely less than is afforded in an
ocean voyage by the variations of weather, not to mention the solace
of human society. Everything around me, except in the one direction in
which the Earth's disc still obscured the Sun, remained unchanged for
hours and days; and the management of my machinery required no more
than an occasional observation of my instruments and a change in the
position of the helm, which occupied but a few minutes some half-dozen
times in the twenty-four hours. There was not even the change of night
and day, of sun and stars, of cloud or clear sky. Were I to describe
the manner in which each day's leisure was spent, I should bore my
readers even more than--they will perhaps be surprised by the
confession--I was bored myself.

My sleep was of necessity more or less broken. I wished to have eight
hours of rest, since, though seven of continuous sleep might well have
sufficed me, even if my brain had been less quiet and unexcited during
the rest of the twenty-four, it