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A perfect morning! clean and crisp, with the sea a translucent blue, and sunlight glittering on the Island beaches; the air still, yet bracing, and withal ineffably pure a morning mysterious with the sense of autumn, but of autumn rarified by its passage over the salt strait, deodorised, made pure of marsh fog and the rotting leaf.
Failing to open communication through Jonas and Cynthy Ann, August found himself in a desperate strait, and with an impatience common to young men he unhappily had recourse to Betsey Malcolm.
This voyage of Cook began in 1778; on the 9th of August, in that year, he ascertained the position and latitude of the western extremity of America, and soon afterwards he determined the width of that strait which divides the two continents.
Before it rose perpetually the haunting vision of another palace of faith another church or company of the faithful, which was to become the shelter of human aspiration amid the desolation and anarchy caused by the crashing of the old! How many men and women must have gone through the same strait as itself how many must be watching with it through the darkness for the rising of a new City of God!
The detective was therefore in a sore strait. But suddenly a new idea struck him. The presence of Aouda on the Rangoon, in company with Phileas Fogg, gave him new material for reflection. Who was this woman? What combination of events had made her Fogg's travelling companion? They had evidently met somewhere between Bombay and Calcutta; but where?
In passing the Strait of Ceylon, the ship which carried Xavier was overtaken with the most horrible tempest which was ever seen. They were constrained, at the very beginning of it, to cast overboard all their merchandize; and the winds roared with so much violence, that the pilot not being able to hold the rudder, abandoned the vessel to the fury of the waves.
But if his sleep was but shammed, and he made use of this pretence only of a natural infirmity, by counterfeiting a nap, to hide the strait he was in at the time in his thoughts, betwixt the shame of sending away the Phaeacians without giving them a friendly collation and hospitable gifts, and the fear he had of being discovered to his enemies by the treating such a company of men together, they then approve it.
A journey across the Alps was in those days regarded as a very perilous enterprise in the winter season, and the fact that he should have been rescued from such a strait appeared almost miraculous.
Then he cometh back to Messire Gawain and falleth upon him and grippeth him sore strait by the flanks, and lifteth him three foot high off the ground and thinketh to carry him to his hold that was within the rock. And as he goeth thither he falleth, Messire Gawain and all, and he lieth undermost.
A straight course was impracticable, for as soon as attempted, and the river was out of sight, the party got entangled in thick brushes and tea-tree swamps, without a blade of grass. They were obliged, therefore, to follow the course of the river in all its windings. The only birds seen were scrub turkeys, and Torres Strait pigeons.
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