We returned to the cabin for half an hour, and having finished off with a caulker of good cogniac, all hands of us once more came on deck.
It was now half-past four, and low water as near as could be. The bar astern of us--by this time the breeze having taken off, we were riding to the ebb--was one roaring ledge of white breakers; but it was smooth water where we lay, the fall of the tide having completely broken the heave of the heavy swell that rolled in from the offing on the bar. The clouds had risen over the land, some large drops of rain fell, and altogether we had strong prognostications of a wet, if not a tempestuous evening.
The declining sun, however, was yet shining brightly; and although, calculating on the average at this season hereabouts, one might have made himself almost sure of a fine evening, yet the present was an exception, and we had every appearance of a thunderstorm.
All nature seemed hushed; the thick clouds that arose in the east, sailed along on the usual current of the trade-wind with their edges as well defined as if it had been a dark screen gradually shoving up and across the arch of the blue empyrean; this gloomy canopy crept on and on, and as it overlapped us and stole down the western horizon, every thing assumed a deep dusky purple hue.
In the sudden darkness, the fires glanced bright and red on board of three war-canoes, that had now been suddenly advanced down the river in the shape of a triangle, the headmost being within a mile of us. Presently, the sable curtain descended within a very few degrees of the western horizon, until there was only a small streak of bright golden sky between it and the line of the land; in the centre of which the glorious sun, now near his setting, shot his level beams of blood-red light over the river and its banks, and the trees that grew on them, gilding the dark sides of the canoes; and as he sank, his last rays flashed up into the black arch overhead, until the dark masses of cloud glowed like crimson.
This soon faded--the clouds gradually sinking in the west, until, as if their scope had been expended, they _lifted_ from the eastern horizon majestically slow--like a magnificent curtain drawn up in order to disclose the glorious moon, which now, preceded by her gemlike forerunner the evening star, that sparkled bright and clear on the fringe of the ascending cloud, rose above the low swampy banks, like a diamond on the skirt of a sable velvet mantle.
