XXII
A night of intense calm on the equatorial sea. In the midst of absolute stillness, the lightest rustlings of the sails are audible—from time to time a negress, sleeping on deck, utters a groan; the vibrations of the human voice are startlingly loud.
All things lie in a tepid stupor. The atmosphere is sluggish with the dull torpor of a slumbering world.
The milky, phosphorescent sea reflects in its vast mirror the hot transparent night. One might fancy oneself between two mirrors, opposite one to the other, eternally reflecting each other, or imagine oneself suspended in vacancy, for no longer is there a distinguishable horizon.
In the distance the two planes are merged in one. Sky and water, both are blended in cosmic, vague, infinite depths.
And the moon is very low in the sky, a great disk of red, rayless fire, hanging in the midst of a world of pale, flax-coloured, phosphorescent vapours.
In the earliest geological ages, before day was divided from night, the universe must have been permeated with this same expectant calm. The pauses between the acts of creation must have been fraught with this same indescribable immobility in those epochs when the worlds were yet nebulous, when light was still diffused and vague, when the brooding clouds were vapourous lead and iron, when infinite and eternal matter was sublimated by the intense heat of aboriginal chaos.