text:  At one time the colours were like shot or clouded silk or the beautiful uncertainty of the Palamida of these shores or the matrix of opal; at another the Pacific Ocean above of which the continuity is often for whole months _entire_ was broken into gigantic continents and a Polynesia of rose-coloured islands that no ships might approach; while in this nether world the middle of the Calabro-Sicilian strait was occupied by a condensation of vapour (one could never profane them by the term of _sea-mist_ or _fog_ ) the most subtile and attenuated which ever came from the realms of cloud-compelling Jove