e means of warning navigators that they were
approaching this danger, and so causing them to haul off in time to
avoid shipwreck.

Upon the night in question, when I first saw it, I found, upon going on
deck, that the darkness was profound, the sky being so completely
obscured by clouds that not so much as a single star was visible. But
away to windward, ranging from about two points on the weather-bow round
to square abeam, the clouds from almost overhead to within some fifteen
degrees of the horizon were faintly yet quite perceptibly tinged
greenish hue, the tinge being strongest about midway between our
weather-bow and beam. Pearce had noticed it, it appeared, when I came
to question him about it, and had thought that it might possibly portend
a change of weather until he had looked at the barometer and found it
inclined to rise; then he had become alarmed by the smoothing of the
water, which seemed to him far more portentous than the light on the
clouds.

I had not been on deck more than a quarter of an hour when the blackness
under the lower edge of the bank blink away over our starboard cathead
began to pale, first to a cold slaty-grey, and from that, by rapid
gradations, to a rich purple, then to crimson, and from crimson to an
orange tint so deep as to be almost scarlet, beneath which the horizon
loomed out black as ink, the intervening space of water lightening, as
it swept toward us, until at the distance of a couple of miles it became
a livid bluish-white. This marked the western edge of the shoal, and
sufficiently accounted for the smoothing of the deep-water in which we
were sailing.

As the orange light spread north and south from the point at which it
had originated, at the same time reaching upward from the horizon, the
bank blink began to fade, or rather to become merged in and overpowered
by it; and the shapes of the heavy, lowering clouds that overhung us
began to reveal themselves, their lower edges here and there suddenly
flushing into hues of the richest yet most delicate rose that rapidly
strengthened first into scarlet and then to burning gold as the rays of
the yet unrisen sun smote upon them. Presently, in the midst of the
rich orange light that was now flashing up on the eastern and
north-eastern horizon, there emerged a shape of indigo, practically
flat-topped, but with two small protuberances, one at each end, which,
by a stretch of the imagination, might be termed hills, rising to a