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By ten o'clock it was light enough to read; the southern sky was a broad sea of golden orange, dotted with a few crimson cloud-islands, and we set ourselves to watch with some anxiety the gradual approach of the exiled god. But for this circumstance, and two other drawbacks, I should have gone to church to witness the Lapps at their religious exercises.
The rose-bushes have their scarlet hips. Distant clumps of trees, now that the variegated foliage adorns them, have a phantasmagorian, an apparition-like appearance. They seem to be of some kindred to the crimson and gold cloud-islands. It would not be strange to see phantoms peeping forth from their recesses.
Down the misty coast, beyond the fort, was Point Lobos a place where wolves did once inhabit; farther south lie the semi-tropics and the fragrant orange lands; while on our left, to the north, is Point Bonita pretty enough in the sunshine, and thereabout is Drake's Bay. Behind us, dimly outlined on the horizon, the Farallones lie faintly blue, like exquisite cloud-islands.
But, on still clear summer evenings, when the sun sinks down into the sea, among golden cloud-capes and cloud-islands, and locks and friths of azure sky, the sailors fancy that they see, away to westward, St. Brandan's fairy isle. But whether men can see it or not, St. Brandan's Isle once actually stood there; a great land out in the ocean, which has sunk and sunk beneath the waves.
The sky that has been all of one hue during the live-long day wherever you looked, nothing but pale, pale azure is now like the palette of some God-painter splashed and freaked with all manner of great and noble colors a most regal blaze of gold wide plains of crimson, as if all heaven were flashing at some high thought little feathery cloud-islands of tenderest rose-pink.
The season was bright with all the glory of the foothill September; the silver dome of heaven, cloudless morning and noon, ripened with the dying day into seas of gold on which floated cloud-islands of purple and amethyst, and through the immeasurable silence of the night moon and stars bathed the deep valleys in celestial effulgence.
He had all his life carried within him a vague consciousness that he had not been to Mara what he should have been, but he had hoped to make amends for all in that future which lay before him, that future now, alas! dissolving and fading away like the white cloud-islands which the wind was drifting from the sky.
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