Yves, who wanted one, set traps for them, but they were too shrewd to be caught.
We were approaching the Equator, and the regular breath of the trade wind began to die away. There were now erratic breezes which shifted suddenly, followed by times of calm in which everything became immobilized in a kind of immense blue splendour; and then the yards, the tops, and the great white sails were reflected in the water in the form of inverted pictures undulating and incomplete.
The Sibylle scarcely moved, she was slow and lazy, she had the movements of one half asleep. In the great moist heat, which even the nights did not diminish, things, as well as men, seemed to be taken with drowsiness. Gradually in the air a strange calm began to reign. And presently clouds, heavy and obscure, gathered over the warm sea like large dark curtains. The Equator was now quite near.
Sometimes flights of swallows, large ones these and strange in movement, rose suddenly from the sea, taking flight in startled fashion with long pointed wings of a glistening blue, and then settled again, and one saw them no more. These were shoals of flying-fish which had lain in our course and which we had disturbed.
The sails, the cordage hung limp, like dead things; we drifted lifeless like a wreck.
Aloft, in Yves' domain, might still be felt some slow movements which were no longer perceptible below. In this motionless air saturated with rays, the crow's nest continued to rock with a tranquil regularity which conduced to slumber. There were long slow oscillations accompanied always by the same flappings of drooping sails, the same creakings of dry wood.
It was intensely hot, and the light had a surprising splendour, and the mournful sea was of a milky blue, of the colour of melted turquoise.
But when the strange dense clouds, which travelled low so as almost to touch the water, passed over us, they brought us night and drenched us with a deluge of rain.
We were now directly under the Equator; and it seemed that there was no breath of air there to carry us forward.
They lasted for hours, sometimes for a whole day, this darkness and these tropical storms. Then Yves and his friends assumed a uniform which they called the "uniform of savages," and sat them down, all heedless, under the warm downpour and let it rain as it would.