As he moves farther down the African coast Hanna reports increasingly eerie phenomena: phantom music heard in the dark, rivers of flame, and a mountain narned "Chariot of the Gods" that seemed to catch fire after nightfall.

No breeze pushes the craft onward, and a torpid flow of heavy water dulls the ship's progress. There is a mass of seaweed among the waves, and, like a hedge, it impedes the prow. Notwithstanding, the surface of the sea does not extend into the deep; the soil is barely covered by a sheet of water. Wild sea-creatures stand in the way on all sides, and sea-monsters swim among the sluggish and lazily crawling ships.

A dark fog enshrouds the air as if in a kind of cloak, and clouds hide the face of the deep always, and this veil remains throughout the whole of the darkened day.

In these regions obtained neither earth as such, nor sea, nor air, hut a kind of mixture of these, similar to the sea-lung, in which ... earth, sea, and everything else is held in suspension; this substance is like a fusion of them all, and can neither be trod upon nor sailed upon.