At first he is taken by surprise, never having dreamt of a state of
existence where existence itself seems suspended. He shakes himself
in his coat, to see whether it be empty or no. He closes his eyes, to
test the reality of the glassy expanse. He fetches a deep breath, by
way of experiment, and for the sake of witnessing the effect. If a
reader of books, Priestley on Necessity occurs to him; and he
believes in that old Sir Anthony Absolute to the very last chapter.
His faith in Malte Brun, however, begins to fail; for the geography,
which from boyhood he had implicitly confided in, always assured him,
that though expatiating all over the globe, the sea was at least
margined by land. That over against America, for example, was Asia.
But it is a calm, and he grows madly skeptical.

To his alarmed fancy, parallels and meridians become emphatically
what they are merely designated as being: imaginary lines drawn round
the earth's surface.

The log assures him that he is in such a place; but the log is
a liar; for no place, nor any thing possessed of a local angularity,
is to be lighted upon in the watery waste.

At length horrible doubts overtake him as to the captain's competency
to navigate his ship. The ignoramus must have lost his way, and
drifted into the outer confines of creation, the region of the
everlasting lull, introductory to a positive vacuity.

Thoughts of eternity thicken. He begins to feel anxious concerning
his soul.

The stillness of the calm is awful. His voice begins to grow strange