94 OUR HERITAGE THE SEA 



Egyptian darkness, that which might be felt ; and 

 with that darkness came silence so profound that the 

 creak of a block or the flap of a sail, unnoticeable at 

 other times, became a noise and startled us. Alarmed, 

 the captain gazed earnestly at the barometer, but it 

 remained steady, gave no sign of any approaching 

 change. Men spoke in whispers, as if afraid of being 

 heard by some one. Parti-coloured flames of elec- 

 tricity played about us now and then, and in the 

 intervals between them the darkness seemed so tan- 

 gible that we were tempted to reach upward and see 

 if it might be touched. It was a night of terror, of 

 fear of the unknown possibilities of the weather, and, 

 above all, of the lightning which played about us 

 incessantly and threatened us, as we thought, with 

 the firing of our cargo of cotton. But, behold! to- 

 wards morning, the heavy black pall, which had 

 apparently been shutting us in with terrors impos- 

 sible to define, gradually rolled away, the shy stars 

 peeped out, and the ineffable glories of a perfectly 

 clear calm night at sea were revealed. There was 

 practically no wind throughout the whole affair, and 

 no rain at all. 



Yes, the stratus is a harmless cloud, if unpic- 

 turesque to the last degree, and bearing the same 

 relation to the decoration of the sky by the cirrus 

 and cumulus as the good, dark, newly -upturned soil 

 does to the loveliness of the blossoming hedgerow. 

 Yet I cannot help thinking that when the stratus 

 and cumulus combine, and the dark heaviness of the 

 former infects the fleecy whiteness of the latter, we 

 get the most useful as well as the most threatening 

 in appearance of all the clouds, the nimbus or rain- 



