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Updated: June 27, 2025
The superb cone this afternoon stood out a deep purple against a serpent-green sky, separated from the brilliant blue ocean by a girdle of pink and gold cumulus, while Grand Canary and Lancarote looked as if they were formed from fantastic-shaped sunset cloud-banks that by some spell had been solidified.
Just as I reached the cloud-banks, with the altimeter marking three thousand, down came the rain. My word, how it poured! It drummed upon my wings and lashed against my face, blurring my glasses so that I could hardly see. I got down on to a low speed, for it was painful to travel against it. As I got higher it became hail, and I had to turn tail to it.
Momentarily, the moon had peeped from the cloud-banks, and where, three hundreds yards behind, the bordering trees were few, a patch of dim light spread across the muddy road and melted away as a new blackness gathered.
I noted now a faint haze on the horizon inshore, like distant cloud-banks, not yet distinct but advancing. Aunt Lucinda, it seemed, was watching something else through the ship's glasses which she had picked up near by. "What is that, over yonder?" asked she "it looks like a wreck of some kind." "It is a wreck that of a lighthouse," I told her.
Silvery cloud-banks heightened the deep blue of the sky, and their slowly-floating shadows intensified the brightness of the sunlight. "Ueberall Sonnenschein!" said the nature-loving German. "Ach, 's ist ein wunderschönes Land!" Brent saw him enter the yard, and came to the door to meet him.
The trees are leafless now; and the whole flat is lightly washed with the most delicate and spare tints, the pasture tinted with the yellowing bent, the pale stubble, the rich plough-land, all blending into a subdued colour; and then, as the day declines and the plain is rimmed with a frosty mist, the smouldering glow of the orange sunset begins to burn clear on the horizon, the grey laminated clouds becoming ridged with gold and purple, till the whole fades, like a shoaling sea, into the purest green, while the cloud-banks grow black and ominous, and far-off lights twinkle like stars in solitary farms.
And presently over the cloud-banks that lay above Westphalia and Saxony the swift aeroplane, with its atomic engine as noiseless as a dancing sunbeam and its phosphorescent gyroscopic compass, flew like an arrow to the heart of the Central European hosts.
I live, myself, for most of the year in a countryside that is often spoken of by its inhabitants as dull, tame, and featureless; yet I cannot say with what daily renewal of delight I wander in the pastoral Cambridge landscape, with its long low lines of wold, its whitewalled, straw-thatched villages embowered in orchards and elms, its slow willow-bound streams, its level fenland, with the far-seen cloud-banks looming overhead: or again in the high-ridged, well-wooded land of Sussex, where I often live, the pure lines of the distant downs seen over the richly coloured intervening weald grow daily more dear and intimate, and appeal more and more closely to the deepest secrets of sweetness and delight.
And cringing, enraptured, frantical, My tail friendly waggle! In vain! Goad further! Cruellest goader! No dog thy game just am I, Cruellest huntsman! Thy proudest of captives, Thou robber 'hind the cloud-banks... Speak finally! Thou lightning-veiled one! Thou unknown one! Speak! What wilt thou, highway-ambusher, from ME? What WILT thou, unfamiliar God? What? Ransom-gold? How much of ransom-gold?
With pangs of hunger and thirst appeased, our pipes filled to the brim and the smoke therefrom curling and twisting itself into cloud-banks, we were a supremely happy lot, and with the poet was ready to sing: "The road is rough and the day is cold, And the landscape's sour and bare, And the milestones, once such charming friends, Half-hearted welcomes wear.
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