THE MEDITERRANEAN SEA. 259 



storms are well known to those who have been voyagers in 

 the Gulf of Lyons and the Archipelago. But we must add 

 a few words also as to the calms of this deep sea the 

 bonaccia of the Italian mariner those times when its waters 

 sleep under the sun for days together, as if they had never 

 been ruffled by wind or storm. The voyager in the Medi- 

 terranean in older times loitered long and wearily under 

 these calms. The traveller of our own days presses forwards 

 despite them ; with the aid of that ever constant motive 

 power, created by and subjected to human skill. Yet even 

 he may well long for breezes to stir the still surface, and 

 give life and motion to the stagnant air. The /cv/jidrwv 

 avdpidjjbov ysXacr/jLa portrays, in language almost peculiar to 

 the great poet who uses it, that happier aspect of seas which 

 gladdens with movement the eye of the sailor; such as 

 Claude so often and so fondly conveys to his canvas, with 

 accompaniments which the Mediterranean shores alone can 

 furnish to the painter. 



That strange and still only partially explained pheno- 

 menon of the Water-Spout, is a very frequent occurrence in 

 the Mediterranean. While all human things have changed 

 over and over again within its circuit, these wonders of 

 nature, even such as seem most eccentric and anomalous, 

 remain what they ever were. The descriptions of Lucretius 

 and Pliny picture the ' demissa, columna de codo* (the 

 Trprj&Trjp of the Greeks), as exactly as the poet or naturalist 

 of our own day would describe .it. Were it not foreign to 

 our subject, we would willingly pause here to invite attention 

 to the general theory of these circular or vorticose move- 

 ments, as they occur in so many phenomena of the natural 

 world ; from the slender spiral of sand, which on a dusty 

 day whirls rapidly before us on the road, to the vast moving 

 columns of the African desert the water-spout which 

 sucks up the sea into the vacuum within its whirl, and 



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