Page:Life in India or Madras, the Neilgherries, and Calcutta.djvu/38

28

ship pressed on in her southward course, battling with wind and wave, until the equator had been left two thousand miles behind us. We had now made southing enough, and turning eastward, varied our course but little for four thousand miles. The most southern point of Africa was far to the north of us, and there was no land to stop our progress to the east.

With the tropics we had left tropical heat and languor, and in these higher latitudes found cool air, high winds, and rough seas. We were again glad to be clothed warmly, and to walk the deck briskly, wrapped in coat and cloak. This seemed appropriate to December and the Christmas holidays; but it must be borne in mind that we were in the southern hemisphere, where December and January are midsummer months, and July and August winter months. We were really experiencing a summer in the south temperate zone, in a latitude corresponding to that of South Carolina, or Gibraltar, in the north. These seas, however, some hundreds of miles to the south of the Cape of Good