It Didn't Suggest Any Ideas To One's Mind About
The Possibility Of Anything Happening To One.
It was excessively
unpleasant to be rolled hither and thither, and I never felt the force
of gravity such
A nuisance before; one's soup at dinner would face one
at an angle of 45 degrees with the horizon, it would look as though
immovable on a steep inclined plane, and it required the nicest handling
to keep the plane truly horizontal. So with one's tea, which would
alternately rush forward to be drunk and fly as though one were a
Tantalus; so with all one's goods, which would be seized with the most
erratic propensities. Still we were unable to imagine ourselves in any
danger, save that one flaxen-headed youth of two-and-twenty kept waking
up his companion for the purpose of saying to him at intervals during
the night, "I say, isn't it awful?" till finally silenced him with a
boot. While on the subject of storms I may add, that a captain, if at
all a scientific man, can tell whether he is in a cyclone (as we were)
or not, and if he is in a cyclone he can tell in what part of it he is,
and how he must steer so as to get out of it. A cyclone is a storm that
moves in a circle round a calm of greater or less diameter; the calm
moves forward in the centre of the rotatory storm at the rate of from
one or two to thirty miles an hour.
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