“Oh, hell, that wasn’t nothing,” Mr. Pike grumbled. “Wait till you see a real pampero. It’s a dirty stretch hereabouts, and I, for one, ’ll be glad when we get across It. I’d sooner have a dozen Cape Horn snorters than one of these. How about you, Mr. Mellaire?” “Same here, sir,” he answered. “Those sou’-westers are honest. You know what to expect. But here you never know. The best of ship-masters can get tripped up off the Plate.” “‘As I’ve found out . . . Beyond a doubt,” Mr. Pike hummed from Newcomb’s _Celeste_, as he went down the ladder. CHAPTER XXIX. The sunsets grow more bizarre and spectacular off this coast of the Argentine. Last evening we had high clouds, broken white and golden, flung disorderly, generously, over the western half of the sky, while in the east was painted a second sunset—a reflection, perhaps, of the first. At any rate, the eastern sky was a bank of pale clouds that shed soft, spread rays of blue and white upon a blue-grey sea. And the evening before last we had a gorgeous Arizona riot in the west. Bastioned upon the ocean cloud-tier was piled upon cloud-tier, spacious and lofty, until we gazed upon a Grand Canyon a myriad times vaster and more celestial than that of the Colorado. The clouds took on the same stratified, serrated, rose-rock formation, and all the hollows were filled with the opal blues and purple hazes of the Painted Lands. The Sailing Directions say that these remarkable sunsets are due to the dust being driven high into the air by the winds that blow across the pampas of the Argentine. And our sunset to-night—I am writing this at midnight, as I sit propped in my blankets, wedged by pillows, while the _Elsinore_ wallows damnably in a dead calm and a huge swell rolling up from the Cape Horn region, where, it does seem, gales perpetually blow. But our sunset. Turner might have perpetrated it. The west was as if a painter had stood off and slapped brushfuls of gray at a green canvas. On this green background of sky the clouds spilled and crumpled. But such a background! Such an orgy of green! No shade of green was missing in the interstices, large and small, between the milky, curdled clouds—Nile-green high up, and then, in order, each with a thousand shades, blue-green, brown-green, grey-green, and a wonderful olive-green that tarnished into a rich bronze-green. During the display the rest of the horizon glowed with broad bands of pink, and blue, and pale green, and yellow. A little later, when the sun was quite down, in the background of the curdled clouds smouldered a wine-red mass of colour, that faded to bronze and tinged all the fading greens with its sanguinary hue. The clouds themselves flushed to rose of all shades, while a fan of gigantic streamers of pale rose radiated toward the zenith. These deepened rapidly into flaunting rose-flame and burned long in the slow-closing twilight.