He crossed the ocean several times, as do those making a land journey at the full speed of an express train.  The august calm of the sea was lost in the throb of the screws and in the deafening roar of the machinery.  However blue the sky might be, it was always darkened by the floating crepe band from the smokestacks.  He envied the leisurely sailboats that the liner was always leaving behind.  They were like reflective wayfarers who saturate themselves with the country atmosphere and commune deeply with its soul.  The people of the steamer lived like terrestrial travelers who sleepily survey from the car-windows a succession of indefinite and dizzying views streaked by telegraph wires.

When his novitiate was ended he became second mate on a sailing vessel bound for Argentina for a cargo of wheat.  The slow day’s run with little wind and the long equatorial calms permitted him to penetrate a little into the mysteries of the oceanic immensity, severe and dark, that for ancient peoples had been “the night of the abyss,” “the sea of utter darkness,” “the blue dragon that daily swallows the sun.”

He no longer regarded Father Ocean as the capricious and tyrannical god of the poets.  Everything in his depths was working with a vital regularity, subject to the general laws of existence.  Even the tempests roared within prescribed and charted quadrangles.

The fresh trade-winds pushed the bark toward the Southeast, maintaining a heavenly serenity in sky and sea.  Before the prow hissed the silken wings of flying fish, spreading out in swarms, like little squadrons of diminutive aeroplanes.

Over the masts and yards covered with canvas, the albatross, eagles of the Atlantic desert, traced their long, sweeping circles, flashing across the purest blue their great, sail-like wings.  From time to time the boat would meet floating prairies, great fields of seaweed dislodged from the Sargasso Sea.  Enormous tortoises drowsed in the midst of these clumps of gulf-weed, serving as islands of repose to the seagulls perched on their shells.  Some of the seaweeds were green, nourished by the luminous water of the surface; others had the reddish color of the deep where enters only the deadly chill of the last rays of the sun.  Like fruits of the oceanic prairies, there floated past close bunches of dark grapes, leathery capsules filled with brackish water.

As they approached the equator, the breeze kept falling and falling, and the atmosphere became suffocating in the extreme.  It was the zone of calms, the ocean of dark, oily waters, in which boats remained for entire weeks with sails limp, without the slightest breath rippling the atmosphere.