The heat
was great; I had never remembered a more biting sun. The pitch in
the seams was soft as putty, the atmosphere was full of the smell
of blistered paint, and it was like putting your hand on a red-hot
stove to touch the binnacle hood or grasp for an an instant an iron
belaying-pin.
A sort of loathing comes into a man with a calm like this. "The
very deep did rot," says the poet; and you understood his fancy
when you marked the blind heave of the swell to the sun standing
in the midst of a sky of brass, with his wake under him sinking in
a sinuous dazzle, as though it was his fiery glance piercing to the
green depths a thousand fathoms deep. It was hot enough to slacken
the nerves and give the imagination a longer scope than sanity
would have it ride by.
That was why, perhaps, I found something awful and forbidding in
the sunset, though at another time it might scarcely have detained
my gaze a minute. But it is true, nevertheless, that others besides
me gaped at the wonderful gushings of hot purple,--arrested whirlpools
of crimson haze, they looked,--in the heart of which the orb sat
rayless, flooding the sea with blood under him, so magnificently
fell was the hue, and flushing the sky with twenty dyes of gold
and orange, till, in the far east, the radiance fainted into the
delicacy of pale amber.
Pages:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25