I was told by the next keeper, that on the 8th of June following, a
particularly clear and beautiful morning, he rose about half an hour
before sunrise, and having a little time to spare, for his custom was
to extinguish his lights at sunrise, walked down toward the shore to
see what he might find. When he got to the edge of the bank he looked
up, and, to his astonishment, saw the sun rising, and already part way
above the horizon. Thinking that his clock was wrong, he made haste
back, and though it was still too early by the clock, extinguished his
lamps, and when he had got through and come down, he looked out the
window, and, to his still greater astonishment, saw the sun just where
it was before, two-thirds above the horizon. He showed me where its
rays fell on the wall across the room. He proceeded to make a fire, and
when he had done, there was the sun still at the same height.
Whereupon, not trusting to his own eyes any longer, he called up his
wife to look at it, and she saw it also. There were vessels in sight on
the ocean, and their crews, too, he said, must have seen it, for its
rays fell on them. It remained at that height for about fifteen minutes
by the clock, and then rose as usual, and nothing else extraordinary
happened during that day. Though accustomed to the coast, he had never
witnessed nor heard of such a phenomenon before. I suggested that there
might have been a cloud in the horizon invisible to him, which rose
with the sun, and his clock was only as accurate as the average; or
perhaps, as he denied the possibility of this, it was such a looming of
the sun as is said to occur at Lake Superior and elsewhere. Sir John
Franklin, for instance, says in his Narrative, that when he was on the
shore of the Polar Sea, the horizontal refraction varied so much one
morning that “the upper limb of the sun twice appeared at the horizon
before it finally rose.”
He certainly must be a son of Aurora to whom the sun looms, when there
are so many millions to whom it _glooms_ rather, or who never see it
till an hour _after_ it has risen. But it behooves us old stagers to
keep our lamps trimmed and burning to the last, and not trust to the
sun’s looming.
This keeper remarked that the centre of the flame should be exactly
opposite the centre of the reflectors, and that accordingly, if he was
not careful to turn down his wicks in the morning, the sun falling on
the reflectors on the south side of the building would set fire to
them, like a burning-glass, in the coldest day, and he would look up at
noon and see them all lighted! When your light is ready to give light,
it is readiest to receive it, and the sun will light it. His successor
said that he had never known them to blaze in such a case, but merely
to smoke.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account