United States or Cayman Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Upborne on the wings of the eastward-setting wind, Nissr felt nothing of such trivialities. Twice or thrice, gaps in the cloud-veil let dim ocean appear to the watchers in the glass observation pits; and once they spied a laboring speck on the waters a great passenger-liner, worrying toward New York in heavy weather.
She expressed no little surprise at the clearness of definition, and the marked enlargement of the discs of the two satellites, and would have used the instrument to scan the stars and visible planets had I not insisted on her retirement; the light atmosphere, as is always the case on clear nights, when no cloud-veil prevents rapid radiation from the surface, being bitterly cold, and her life not having accustomed her to the night air even in the most genial season.
Yet once, when the cloud-veil wrapped Westarwan from sight, and the wrath rose loud and fierce, she flashed a contemptuous smile upon the rest, bidding them hold their peace. 'What need to wrangle? she said, in calm superiority; great Westarwan is proud; but though the stars seem to crown his head, his feet are of the earth, earthy.
They crowded still more closely round her, but so quietly and so gently that she felt nothing more than the touch of wondering hands on her arms, and dress, and hair. As Redgrave said afterwards, he was "absolutely out of it." They seemed to imagine him to be a kind of uncouth monster, possibly the slave of this radiant being which had come so strangely from somewhere beyond the cloud-veil.
On the forenoon of Sunday, September 17, he saw a great comet close to, and rapidly approaching the sun. It was, in fact, then within a few hours of perihelion. Some measures of position were promptly taken; but a cloud-veil covered the interesting spectacle before mid-day was long past. Mr. Finlay at the Cape was more completely fortunate.
All around the horizon the sky so throbbed that here and there it rent the sheer cloud-veil that lay in delicate illusion over the blue. Through the trees played frightened flashes of colour, the whisk of a cardinal's wing, the burnt-red plume of a fox-squirrel's tail. In the air there was a palpitancy that was to the dream senses what colour vibrations are to the eye.
The cloud-veil hid the stars from Gram, and Elaine had missed them, since coming home from Excalibur. The shadow of an aircar fell briefly upon them and they looked up and turned their heads, in time to see it sink with graceful dignity toward the landing-stage of Karval House, and he glimpsed its blazonry sword and atom-symbol, the badge of the ducal house of Ward.
Then she took out the comb and one or two hairpins which kept the coils in position, deftly caught the ends, and then, after a few rapid movements of her fingers, she shook her head, and the wondering crowd about her saw, what seemed to them a shimmering veil, half gold, half silver, in the soft reflected light from the cloud-veil, fall down from her head over her shoulders.
"I hardly think so," he said, as the Astronef dropped slowly through the thin cloud-veil. "You know spectrum analysis has proved that there is a gas in Saturn's atmosphere which we know nothing about, and, however good it may be for the Saturnians, it's not very likely that it would agree with us, so I think we'd better be content with our own.
At the same moment the professor manipulated another valve, intently watching the barometer-tube meanwhile; and presently it became apparent that the descending movement had ceased, and that the Flying Fish was hanging suspended in mid-air, about a thousand feet below the vast cloud-veil that now obscured the heavens.
Word Of The Day