The Nose Knows

Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass Part Two: Bulvangar

One morning there was a different smell in the air, and the ship was moving oddly, with a brisker rocking from side to side instead of plunging and soaring [...] The smell was of fish, but mixed with it come land smells too: pine resin and earth and something animal and musky, and something else that was cold and blank and wild: it might have been snow. It was the smell of the North.

Compare the smell passage with that of Explosion in a Cathedral by Alejo Carpentier translated by John Sturrock

After blowing across the land, the northerly breeze was gathering new impetus over the expanse of sea, and bringing with it those vegetal smells which the look-outs could scent high in the crow's nest, distinguishing the smell of Trinidad from that of Sierra Maestra or Cabo Cruz.

Different latitudes similar attitudes.

And so for day 250
21.08.2007