Did not the Whole of Me that I can so dimly
feel set my foot upon this ship?" And going out on deck
before I slept, I looked at the stars and thought that we
were like the infant in the womb that knows not how nor
where it is carried.
We might be four hundred leagues from Spain. Still
the wind drove us, still we hardly shifted canvas, still the
sky spread clear, of a vast blue depth, and the blue glass
plain of the sea lay beneath. It was too smooth, the wind
in our rigging too changeless of tune. At last, all would
have had variety spring. There began a veritable hunger
for some change, and it was possible to feel a faint horror.
_What if this is the horror--to go on forever and ever like
this_?
Then one morning when the sun rose, it lit a novel thing.
Seaweed or grass or herbage of some sort was afloat about
us. Far as the eye might reach it was like a drowned
meadow, vari-colored, awash. All that day we watched it.
It came toward us from the west; we ran through it from
the east. Now it thinned away; now it thickened until it
seemed that the sea was strewn with rushes like a castle
floor. With oars we caught and brought into ship wreaths
of it. All night we sailed in this strange plain. A yellow
dawn showed it still on either side the _Santa Maria_, and
thicker, with fewer blue sea straits and passes than on yesterday.
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