Читать книгу In Quest of El Dorado онлайн

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This one is a beautiful voyage, so serene, with blue skies every day and a just-waving sea and a breeze behind the boat that wafts our smoke ahead of it. It is delicious to sit up on the very nose of the vessel and be a Columbus now. We are splashing it new, splashing it white, in stars and white balls and darts of surprised foam. Green and yellow seaweed sags up from the depths of the ocean and, like untraversed liquid glass, the sea is ahead of us in curving lines, in natural wild parallels to the sun. It is afternoon, the sun is going over and will go under. He is drawing us on, and I could almost believe our steam counts for naught. He is illuminating the wide empty ocean, and we stare till we veritably see latitude and longitude upon it. We ascend, we lift, we rive a way o'er the mirror in virginal v's of new frothing foam. We are making for the center of the far horizon, the sun ahead of us; we are making a new way to India; we are going to make West East.

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Each still night we seem to pass through something, as it were through mists and veils which are hiding something new. Each morning we rush on to the decks whilst they are still wet and the Castilian sailors are swabbing them. We peer with glasses over the virginal, fresh, foaming blue. The sailors go. The sun dries the timbers. We partake of coffee and smoke a sweet-scented Habana cigarette. The sailors return and pull up white canvas awnings at the cracks and at the sides of which glimmers blue of sky and brightness of sea. The children come out from their cabins to play, tumbling over their pet dogs. All is happiness.