16           A Midsummer Trip to the Tropics.
II.
Morning: the second day. The sea is an extraor-
dinary blue,—looks to me something like violet ink.
Close by the ship, where the foam-clouds are, it is beau-
tifully mottled,—looks like blue marble with exquisite
veinings and nebulosities. . . . Tepid wind, and cottony
white clouds,—cirri climbing up over the edge of the sea
all around. The sky is still pale blue, and the horizon
is full of a whitish haze.
... A nice old French gentleman from Guadeloupe
presumes to say this is not blue water ;—he declares it
greenish (verdâtré). Because I cannot discern the green,
he tells me I do not yet know what blue water is. Atten-
dez un peu ! . . .
The sky-tone deepens as the sun ascends,—deep-
ens deliciously. The warm wind proves soporific. I
drop asleep with the blue light in my face,—the strong
bright blue of the noonday sky. As I doze it seems to
burn like a cold fire right through my eyelids. Waking
up with a start, I fancy that everything is turning blue,-
myself included. " Do you not call this the real tropi-
cal blue ?" I cry to my French fellow-traveller. "Mm
Dieu! non," he exclaims, as in astonishment at the ques-
tion ._« this is not blue !" . . . What can be his idea of
blue, I wonder !
Clots of sargasso float by,—light-yellow sea-weed. We
are nearing the Sargasso-sea,—entering the path of the
trade-winds. There is a long ground-swell, the steamer
rocks and rolls, and the tumbling water always seems
to me growing bluer; but my friend from Guadeloupe
says that this color " which I call blue" is only darkness
—only the shadow of prodigious depth.
Nothing now but blue sky and what I persist in call-
ing blue sea. The clouds have melted away in the bright
"low.    There is no sign of life in the azure gulf above,