Here is light in all its purity and perfection. The blue of a young girl’s eyes, or the delicate green of April meadows, seem gross and hard in comparison with this light. It is quiet, yet alive with beauty. It enchants like a perfume; it evokes a solemn rapture. Surely the robes of angels must be woven from rays of such light. But from behind the mountains the sun rises. Objects appear more clearly and lose their delicacy of line. Far to the North over the Dalmatian Isles a few clouds stain the sky. The haze is lifting from the bay of Cattaro, the details of which we study through our glasses--gray spots of forts, white streaks of lighthouses, smoke of Austrian ships sheltered in the roadstead. Above the town, which is still invisible, slowly rises a black point like a dark bubble; I watch this suspicious ascension, but cannot yet make out what it means. On the other side the sun hangs on the summit of a mountain. All the air seems to vibrate. One’s eyes are dazzled at such refulgence, such clearness. The sun frees himself from the mountain peaks, and as he rises pours down a triumphal torrent of light. The Dalmatian Isles, the Austrian coast rise suddenly, imposing and menacing. The cruisers to the South reflect a radiance from their hulls, the sheet of sea over which our cruiser advances alone is covered with a glassy surface which the eye cannot penetrate. With their hands on the mortar, the gunners stand stiller than ever. In the bow of the ship the sailors who do not belong to the watch keep their eyes on the approaching land and the gliding sea. The ascending black point has stopped, and seems held at the end of a line. Now I recognize it for a captive balloon. Its casing, its cording, looks as transparent as a spider’s web. But from its height a human eye has observed us; the submarines and destroyers have been warned by telephone; and all is astir, in this inaccessible arsenal, with the effort to attack, without danger to themselves, the cruiser that offers them battle. In the splendor of the still morning, this captive balloon symbolizes the troubled passions of men--murder and destruction. But it is delightful to approach the enemy through all this enchantment. Under the sunlight the sea has become blue and seductive again, and the death of the cruiser, should it occur, will take on a sort of divine beauty in this brightness. Things begin to happen. Out of the last bank of mist which stretches along the coast there mount in spiral flights two almost imperceptible insects. At so great a distance they resemble two animated bits of dust. They are Austrian aeroplanes seeking the height and the currents of air favorable for attack. They see the _Waldeck-Rousseau_, lost in the sea-mist, and instantly separate, one drawing northward, the other southward. In a few minutes their outlines are hidden in the clouds, and we no longer know what has become of them.