the water shows olive and ochreous tones alternately;--the foam
is yellow in our wake. These might be the colors of a fresh-water
inundation....

A fellow-traveller tells me, as we lean over the rail, that this
same viscous, glaucous sea washes the great penal colony of
Cayenne--which he visited. When a convict dies there, the
corpse, sewn up in a sack, is borne to the water, and a great
bell tolled. Then the still surface is suddenly broken by fins
innumerable--black fins of sharks rushing to the hideous
funeral: they know the Bell!...

There is land in sight--very low land,--a thin dark line
suggesting marshiness; and the nauseous color of the water always
deepens.

As the land draws near, it reveals a beautiful tropical
appearance. The sombre green line brightens color, I sharpens
into a splendid fringe of fantastic evergreen fronds, bristling
with palm crests. Then a mossy sea-wall comes into sight--dull
gray stone--work, green-lined at all its joints. There is a
fort. The steamer's whistle is exactly mocked by a queer echo,
and the cannon-shot once reverberated--only once: there are no
mountains here to multiply a sound. And all the while the water
becomes a thicker and more turbid green; the wake looks more and
more ochreous, the foam ropier and yellower. Vessels becalmed
everywhere speck the glass-level of the sea, like insects
sticking upon a mirror. It begins, all of a sudden, to rain
torrentially; and through the white storm of falling drops
nothing is discernible.