There fell a dead calm one day about noon; the air was almost suffocating, the sea like glass or oil, and there was not a breath of wind to stir the canvas, or even to wave the scarlet fringes of the quarter-deck awning, under the shade of which Ethel and Rose reclined languidly, with light summer dresses, and fan in hand.
It was strange that with this listlessness below there seemed to be aloft a current of air, which did not descend even to the skysail-yards, but played with the vane and its scarlet streamer on the mainmast-head.
On this day the Hermione was about a hundred miles to the northward of St. Helena. The air was thin and ambient; the sunlight, broad and blazing, exhaling from the sea a thin white haze, which, at the dim horizon, made the sea and sky so blend together, that none could tell where cloud began and water ended.
Through the glassy surface of the still, calm sea the black crooked fin of a great shark was seen, as he glided stealthily alongside, preceded, as usual, by the long, wriggling pilot-fish.
It was evidently a white shark, by the mode in which he swallowed; for when the cook cast some offal to him, he turned on his back, and opening his dreadful mouth, exhibited his six-fold row of teeth, triangular, and sharp as razors. This terrible apparatus for mastication is quite flat in the mouth when the shark is in a state of quietude; but when biting or swallowing food, it has the power of erecting it with vast power, by the enormous muscles of the jaw.
The whole body being of a light ash colour, his grim form, with the motion of his pectoral fins, could be distinctly seen, as he floated alongside, or glided to and fro.
Now Zuares Barradas, a daring and athletic young fellow, stripped of everything but his canvas trousers, appeared suddenly in the starboard forechains with a coil of rope in his hand, and a murmur almost rang along the deck, as he made one end of his coil fast to a belaying-pin, preparatory to plunging into the sea.
"Oh, Mr. Quail!" exclaimed Ethel, "is he about to fish for that dreadful thing?"
"No, miss," replied Quail, quietly; "he is going to attack it."
"Attack it?"