FREE BOOKS

Author's List




PREV.   NEXT  
|<   122   123   124   125   126   127   128   129   130   131   132   133   134   135   136   137   138   139   140   141   142   143   144   145   146  
147   148   149   150   151   152   153   154   155   156   157   158   159   160   161   162   163   164   165   166   167   168   169   170   171   >>   >|  
Plate gave it to me--lost half our sticks, twenty hours on our beam-ends, cargo shifted, and foundered. I was two days in the boat before an English tramp picked us up. And none of the other boats ever was picked up." "The _Elsinore_ behaved very well last night," I put in cheerily. "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,
PREV.   NEXT  
|<   122   123   124   125   126   127   128   129   130   131   132   133   134   135   136   137   138   139   140   141   142   143   144   145   146  
147   148   149   150   151   152   153   154   155   156   157   158   159   160   161   162   163   164   165   166   167   168   169   170   171   >>   >|  



Top keywords:
clouds
 

sunset

 

sunsets

 

Argentine

 

evening

 
Elsinore
 
background
 

picked

 
vaster
 

hollows


Canyon

 

filled

 
myriad
 

celestial

 
Colorado
 

serrated

 
stratified
 
formation
 

canvas

 

crumpled


interstices

 

gorgeous

 

Arizona

 

missing

 

spread

 

Bastioned

 

spilled

 

spacious

 

purple

 

perpetually


Turner

 
blankets
 

wedged

 

propped

 

perpetrated

 
midnight
 

pillows

 
rolling
 

region

 
wallows

damnably
 

painter

 
Directions
 
remarkable
 

Sailing

 

Painted

 
pampas
 

writing

 
slapped
 

brushfuls