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, large and small, between the milky, curdled
clouds--Nile-green high up, and then, in order, each with a thousand
shades, blue-green, brown-green, grey-green, and a wonderful olive-green
that tarnished into a rich bronze-green.
During the display the rest of the horizon glowed with broad bands of
pink, and blue, and pale green, and yellow. A little later, when the sun
was quite down, in the background of the curdled clouds smouldered a wine-
red mass of colour, that faded to bronze and tinged all the fading greens
with its sanguinary hue. The clouds themselves flushed to rose of all
shades, while a fan of gigantic streamers of pale rose radiated toward
the zenith. These deepened rapidly into flaunting rose-flame and burned
long in the slow-closing twilight.
And with all this wonder of the beauty of the world still glowing in my
brain hours afterward, I hear the snarling of Mr. Pike above my head, and
the trample and drag of feet as the men move from rope to rope and pull
and haul. More weather is making, and from the way sail is being taken
in it cannot be far off.
* * * * *
Yet at daylight this morning we were still wallowing in the same dead
calm and sickly swell. Miss West says the barometer is down, but that
the warning has been too long, for the Plate, to amount to anything. Pamperos happen quickly here, and though the Elsinore, under bare poles to her upper-topsails, is prepared for anything, it may well be that they will be crowding on canvas in another hour.
Mr. Pike was so fooled that he actually had set the topgallant-sails, and
the gaskets were being taken off the royals, when the Samurai came on
deck, strolled back and forth a casual five minutes, then spoke in an
undertone to Mr. Pike. Mr. Pike did not like it. To me, a tyro, it was
evident that he disagreed with his master. Nevertheless, his voice went
out in a snarl aloft to the men on the royal-yards to make all fast
again. Then it was clewlines and buntlines and lowering of yards as the
topgallant-sails were stripped off. The crojack was taken in, and some
of the outer fore-and-aft handsails, whose order of names I can never
remember.
A breeze set in from the south-west, blowing briskly under a clear sky. I
could see that Mr. Pike was secretly pleased. The Samurai had been
mistaken. And each time Mr. Pike glanced aloft at the naked topgallant-
and royal-yards, I knew his thought was that they might well be carrying
sail. I was quite convinced that the Plate had fooled Captain West. So
was Miss West convinced, and, being a favoured person like myself, she
frankly told me so.
"Father will be setting sail in half an hour," she prophesied.