excerption of a book - 3

可怕的赤道无风带：The Doldrums - (part 1)

At Dakar, we had said goodbye to the Old World and, without sighting the Cape Verde islands, had reached the fateful seven degrees north, where in 1498, during his third voyage, Columbus, who was heading in the right direction for the discovery of Brazil, changed course towards the north-west and so managed, by some miracle, to arrive two weeks later at Trinidad and the coast of  Venezuela.

We were approaching  Le Pot-au-Noir (the Doldrums), which was greatly feared by the old navigators. The winds peculiar to both hemispheres stop on either side of this area, and the sails would hang for weeks on end without a single breath of wind to stir them into life. The air is so still that one might think oneself in some confined space instead of out on the open sea; dark clouds, with no breeze to disturb their balance, are affected only by gravity, and slowly disintegrate as they drift down towards the sea. Were they less sluggish, their straggling tips could trail across the polished surface of the see which, lit indirectly by the rays of an invisible sun, has a dull, oily sheen, much brighter than the sky, which remains inky black, so that the normal relationship of luminosity between air and water is reversed. If one looks at the vista the wrong way up, a more likely seascape appears, in which sky and sea have changed places. Across the horizon, which appears closer because of the passivity of the elements and the relative dimness of the light, occasional squalls can be seen lazily moving, like blurred, short-lived columns which still further diminish the apparent distance between the sea and the overcast sky. Between these adjoining surfaces the boat slips along with a kind of anxious haste, as if it had only a short period of grace in which to escape being smotherd. From time to time, a squall approaches the ship, loses its outlines, invades the whole of space and lashes the deck with its wet thongs. Then, having passed beyoud, it resumes its visible form, while its presene as a volume of sound dies away.