The night was warm and dark, illumined only by an extraordinary phosphorescence in the wake of the ship; everybody was asleep on board except the steersman, who, in order to keep himself awake, sang all night, but in a voice so soft and so subdued that one might have thought that he feared to awake the men of the watch, or that he himself was half asleep.  We did not weary of listening to him, for his singing was of the strangest kind.  He observed a rhythm and modulations totally different from those we are accustomed to, and seemed to allow his voice to go at random, like the smoke of the vessel carried away and swayed by the breeze.  It was a reverie rather than a song, a kind of careless divagation of the voice, with which the mind had little to do, but which kept time with the swaying of the ship, the faint sound of the dead water, and resembled a vague improvisation, restrained, nevertheless, by sweet and monotonous forms.

When night had passed into day, the steep coasts of Majorca, dentelees au soleil du matin par les aloes et les palmiers, came in sight, and soon after El Mallorquin landed its passengers at Palma.  Madame Sand had left Paris a fortnight before in extremely cold weather, and here she found in the first half of November summer heat.  The newcomers derived much pleasure from their rambles through the town, which has a strongly-pronounced character of its own and is rich in fine and interesting buildings, among which are most prominent the magnificent Cathedral, the elegant Exchange (la lonja), the stately Town-Hall, and the picturesque Royal Palace (palacio real).  Indeed, in Majorca everything is picturesque,

from the hut of the peasant, who in his most insignificant buildings has preserved the tradition of the Arabic style, to the infant clothed in rags and triumphant in his “malproprete grandiose,” as Heine said a propos of the market-women of Verona.  The character of the landscape, whose vegetation is richer than that of Africa is in general, has quite as much breadth, calm, and simplicity.  It is green Switzerland under the sky of Calabria, with the solemnity and silence of the East.

But picturesqueness alone does not make man’s happiness, and Palma seems to have afforded little else.  If we may believe Madame Sand, there was not a single hotel in the town, and the only accommodation her party could get consisted of two small rooms, unfurnished rather than furnished, in some wretched place where travellers are happy to find “a folding-bed, a straw-bottomed chair, and, as regards food, pepper and garlic a discretion.”  Still, however great their discomfort and disgust might be, they had to do their utmost to hide their feelings; for, if they had made faces on discovering vermin in their beds and scorpions in their soup, they would certainly have hurt the susceptibilities of the natives, and would probably have exposed themselves to unpleasant consequences.  No inhabitable apartments were to be had in the town itself, but in its neighbourhood a villa chanced to be vacant, and this our party rented at once.