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Updated: June 20, 2025
It was such a light as he had never seen, except in dreams. Pale moonlight and dimmed starlight and wan dawn all vague and strange and shadowy under the wild and vivid light of burning grass. In the pale path before Slone, that fanlike slope of sand which opened down into the valley, appeared a swiftly moving black object, like a fleeing phantom. It was a phantom horse.
In depression they had shed most of their leaves; and bare serpent-branches, which might be purple with wistaria in the late spring long after everybody had gone to the north, coiled dismally over the fanlike roof of dirty glass that sheltered a blistered front door. Inside, a faint odour of mouldiness hung in the air of the rooms, which had been shut up unoccupied for a long time.
Among the most remarkable were the white-stemmed cecropia; the cow-tree, of still loftier growth; and the indiarubber tree, with its smooth grey bark, tall erect trunk, and thick glossy leaves: while intermixed with them appeared the assai palm, with its slender stem, its graceful head, and its delicate green plumes; and the mirite, one of the most beautiful of the palm tribe, having abundant clusters of glossy fruit, and enormous spreading, fanlike leaves, cut into ribbons.
It passes out of a broad ravine and spreads fanlike upon the shore under the neighboring cliffs. It is three miles in breadth along the front, and is twelve hundred feet in height when it begins to crumble and slope toward the shore. A terminal moraine, a mile and a half in depth, separates it from the sea.
The branching tendrils of her hair, all alive and fanlike now in the coolness of the night, made a nimbus of black and silver from which her shadowed face shone like a faint pure pearl. As he seemed younger, so did she seem older; under the moon she was no longer a child, but a woman with mysterious eyes. An impulse came to him the rare impulse of confidence!
The mountain was breathing slowly and heavily a vast flare that lifted fanlike in the skies and died away. Lightning played fitfully through the dense mass of smoke and choking gases that hung like a pall over the great cone. It was like the night sky that overhangs a city of gigantic blast-furnaces, only infinitely multiplied.
The sky, naked of clouds, had become a brightening sphere of pearliness; a deep rose gathered over the hills and spread fanlike, licking up the ashen pallor with stabs of flame. A livid red-gold rim sprang into being behind the hill crests, and slowly and in state the sun swam up the molten sky. He turned to Blanche with the tears in his eyes. "Dearest, the sun has risen!"
On the threshold he paused, listened again to the dreary strain, and then hastily descended into the court. As he did so he saw the good sister with the high-colored cheeks and the fanlike frill to her coiffure, who had admitted him, was in conference at the gate with two persons who had just come in.
Occasionally, too, a stray whisper of breeze stole along the creek-bed and rustled the beeches, or stirred in the broad, fanlike leaves of the "cucumber trees." A great block of sandstone, to whose summit a man standing in his saddle could scarcely reach his fingertips, towered above the stream, with a gnarled scrub oak clinging tenaciously to its apex.
In an hour the horses were sufficiently calmed and fed, the camp slowly unwound itself, the teams were set to and were led out of the circle, and as the rays of the setting sun began to expand fanlike across the plain the cavalcade moved on. But between them and the sinking sun, and visible through its last rays, was a faint line of haze parallel with their track.
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