The threads and lines and beds of vapour extending all over the sky
served to reverberate the glory of the sunset, as the crags and peaks
of mountains fling onwards the echoes of the thunder-clap. In the east
it was all jasper and sapphire, reds and greens, and a lovely clear
blue slowly burning to a carnelian in the zenith, where the effulgence
lay in a pool of deep red with a haze of light like fine rain floating
down upon it half white, half of silver; then followed a jacinthine
hue, a lustrous red most daintily delicate, with streaks of clear
green like the beryl, till the eye came to the west, where the sun,
vastly enlarged by refraction, hung in enormous bulk of golden fiery
magnificence amid half-curtained pavilions of living splendour, where
'twas like looking at some newly-wrought fairy world robed in the
shinings of the Heaven of Christ to see the lakes and lagoons of amber
purple and yellow, the seas of molten gold, the starry flamings in the
chrysolite brows of vapour, and the sky fading out north and south in
lights and tints as fair as the reflections in the wet pearly interior
of a sea-shell gaping on a beach towards the setting sun. The small
swell traversing the great red light that was upon the sea put lines of
flowing glory under the tapestries of that sunset, and the appearance
was that of an eager shouldering of the effulgence into the grey of the
south quarter, as though old Neptune sought to honourably distribute
the glory all around, and render the western sea-board ambient.
Then it was, while the lower limb of the luminary yet sipped from the
horizon the gold of his own showering, that the picture of the wreck,
and the Death Ship heaving pale and stripped of her canvas, became the
wonder that my memory must for ever find it. How steadfastly the dead
seaman at the wheel kept watch! The quieted sea now scarce stirred
the rudder, and the occasional light movements of the figure seemed
like starts in him, motions of surprise at the Dutchmen's antlike
pertinaciousness in their stripping of the hull.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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