There was a third silence. The clouds in the west had now lost most of their gorgeous tints. They were generally of a deep purple, almost approaching to black, with only their edges tinged here and there with gold or crimson. Instead of lying, in fleecy piles, or hanging like thick curtains drawn partially aside, as they had awhile before, they were broken up into all sorts of fantastic shapes: castles and battlements, mountains and deep valleys, towers and spires, vast elephantine forms and figures, gigantic and weird as the Brocken: airy dissolving views that were every moment changing. One mass of these clouds the two persons we have introduced continued to watch for some time. At first it had attracted their attention by its striking similarity to Gibraltar, as it stretched darkly along the horizon, like a colossal sleeping lion. Gradually the vapors spread horizontally, and became almost shapeless. Then, suddenly, they assumed form again, and there, plain to even the most unimaginative, was an old woman in a short-gown, with one foot angrily uplifted, a pipe in her mouth, and the most grotesque of all caps upon her head. A light, silvery laugh broke from the young girl, and clapping her hands, gleefully, she cried, “Aunt, aunt, see!” Even the stately dame smiled, but only for a moment, when she looked more prim than ever, as if fearing she had lowered her dignity. “The moon will rise directly,” she said, crossing to the opposite side of the ship, whither her niece soon followed her. In the eastern sky, the clouds were now of the richest amber, while under them the ocean was suffused with a delicate rosy hue. These tints slowly faded from both the firmament and sea, and darkness began to accumulate upon the prospect. In the course of a quarter of an hour, night had settled down. And now there appeared above a bank of cloud, that lay like a range of dark hills on the seaboard, the upper edge of the moon’s disc. Instantaneously a bit of moonlight glimmered on the waters close under the side of the ship. As the planet gradually rose from behind the cloud, like some huge burnished ball of copper, the line of light extended itself to the eastern horizon, a tremulous bridge of silver.