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.
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