ocation with him. Silently he nodded like the
still statue in the opera of Don Juan. Indeed he never spoke, unless
to give pithy utterance to the wisdom of keeping one's wardrobe in
repair. But herein my Viking at times waxed oracular. And many's the
hour we glided along, myself deeply pondering in the stem, hand upon
helm; while crosslegged at the other end of the boat Jarl laid down
patch upon patch, and at long intervals precept upon precept; here
several saws, and there innumerable stitches.

CHAPTER XVI
They Are Becalmed

On the eighth day there was a calm.

It came on by night: so that waking at daybreak, and folding my arms
over the gunwale, I looked out upon a scene very hard to describe.
The sun was still beneath the horizon; perhaps not yet out of sight
from the plains of Paraguay. But the dawn was too strong for the
stars; which, one by one, had gone out, like waning lamps after a
ball.

Now, as the face of a mirror is a blank, only borrowing character
from what it reflects; so in a calm in the Tropics, a colorless sky
overhead, the ocean, upon its surface, hardly presents a sign of
existence. The deep blue is gone; and the glassy element lies
tranced; almost viewless as the air.

But that morning, the two gray firmaments of sky and water seemed
collapsed into a vague ellipsis. And alike, the Chamois seemed
drifting in the atmosphere as in the sea. Every thing was fused into
the calm: sky, air, water, and all. Not a fish was to be seen. The
silence was that of a vacuum. No vitality lurked in the air. And this
inert blending and brooding of all things seemed gray chaos in
conception.

This calm lasted four days and four nights; during which, but a few
cat's-paws of wind varied the scene. They were faint as the breath of
one dying.

At times the heat was intense. The heavens, at midday, glowing like
an ignited coal mine. Our skin curled up like lint; our vision became
dim; the brain dizzy.

To our consternation, the water in the breaker became
lukewarm, brackish, and slightly putrescent; notwithstanding we kept
our spare clothing piled upon the breaker, to shield it from the sun.
At last, Jarl enlarged the vent, carefully keeping it exposed. To
this precaution, doubtless, we owed more than we then thought. It was
now deemed wise to reduce our allowance of water to the smallest
modicum consistent with the present preservation of life; strangling
all desire for more.

Nor was this all. The up