In the atmosphere of the Easterly weather, as pellucid as a piece
of crystal and refracting like a prism, we could see the appalling
numbers of our helpless company, even to those who in more normal
conditions would have remained invisible, sails down under the
horizon. It is the malicious pleasure of the East Wind to augment
the power of your eyesight, in order, perhaps, that you should see
better the perfect humiliation, the hopeless character of your
captivity. Easterly weather is generally clear, and that is all
that can be said for it--almost supernaturally clear when it likes;
but whatever its mood, there is something uncanny in its nature.
Its duplicity is such that it will deceive a scientific instrument.
No barometer will give warning of an easterly gale, were it ever so
wet. It would be an unjust and ungrateful thing to say that a
barometer is a stupid contrivance. It is simply that the wiles of
the East Wind are too much for its fundamental honesty. After
years and years of experience the most trusty instrument of the
sort that ever went to sea screwed on to a ship's cabin bulkhead
will, almost invariably, be induced to rise by the diabolic
ingenuity of the Easterly weather, just at the moment when the
Easterly weather, discarding its methods of hard, dry, impassive
cruelty, contemplates drowning what is left of your spirit in
torrents of a peculiarly cold and horrid rain. The sleet-and-hail
squalls following the lightning at the end of a westerly gale are
cold and benumbing and stinging and cruel enough. But the dry,
Easterly weather, when it turns to wet, seems to rain poisoned
showers upon your head. It is a sort of steady, persistent,
overwhelming, endlessly driving downpour, which makes your heart
sick, and opens it to dismal forebodings. And the stormy mood of
the Easterly weather looms black upon the sky with a peculiar and
amazing blackness. The West Wind hangs heavy gray curtains of mist