It rolls the midmost waters of the world, the
Indian ocean and Atlantic being but its arms.
Science has decided on the globe the direction of five principal currents: one in the North Atlantic, a second in the South, a third in the North Pacific, a fourth in the South, and a fifth in the Southern
Indian Ocean. It is even probable that a sixth current existed at one time or another in the Northern
Indian Ocean, when the Caspian and Aral Seas formed but one vast sheet of water.
So the king went all through the crowd with his hat swabbing his eyes, and blessing the people and praising them and thanking them for being so good to the poor pirates away off there; and every little while the prettiest kind of girls, with the tears running down their cheeks, would up and ask him would he let them kiss him for to remember him by; and he always done it; and some of them he hugged and kissed as many as five or six times -- and he was invited to stay a week; and everybody wanted him to live in their houses, and said they'd think it was an honor; but he said as this was the last day of the camp-meeting he couldn't do no good, and besides he was in a sweat to get to the
Indian Ocean right off and go to work on the pirates.
He gazed with wonder upon the fortifications which make this place the Gibraltar of the
Indian Ocean, and the vast cisterns where the English engineers were still at work, two thousand years after the engineers of Solomon.
Dense borders of mango-trees protected its margin, and the ebb-tide disclosed to view their thick roots, chafed and gnawed by the teeth of the
Indian Ocean. The sands which, at an earlier period, formed the coast-line, rounded away along the distant horizon, and Mount Nguru reared aloft its sharp summit in the northwest.
"Then we entered the
Indian Ocean and steered north- erly for Java Head.
It was Lord Tennington's plan to cruise through the Mediterranean, and the Red Sea to the
Indian Ocean, and thus down the East Coast, putting in at every port that was worth the seeing.
Even at this day, if the Malay Archipelago were converted into land, the tropical parts of the
Indian Ocean would form a large and perfectly enclosed basin, in which any great group of marine animals might be multiplied; and here they would remain confined, until some of the species became adapted to a cooler climate, and were enabled to double the southern capes of Africa or Australia, and thus reach other and distant seas.
In short, at the moment in which she has just obtained from Richelieu a carte blanche by the means of which she is about to take vengeance on her enemy, this precious paper is torn from her hands, and it is D'Artagnan who holds her prisoner and is about to send her to some filthy Botany Bay, some infamous Tyburn of the
Indian Ocean.
"All the animals from here to the
Indian Ocean are talking about this wonderful man, and how he can cure any kind of sickness, and how kind he is--the only man in the whole world who can talk the language of the animals!
-- We arrived in view of the Keeling or Cocos Islands, situated in the
Indian Ocean, and about six hundred miles distant from the coast of Sumatra.
Atlantic, Pacific, and
Indian oceans. One and all, they were harpooned and dragged up hither from the bottom of the sea.