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Then our young man bade good-bye, merely saying, "You'll keep your berth for a couple of days, and then signal us if you want me." The sky was ragged and wild with the tattered banners of cloud; the sea was inky dark, and the wind had an iron ring. The Mission vessel had dropped to leeward of the fishing smack, and the boat had about three hundred yards to go. But what a three hundred yards!
Raining hard, a strong wind blowing, and the thick, black, inky darkness every now and then illuminated by the flash of the guns. Death was certainly in evidence to-night. One felt it. The creative genius of the weirdest, imaginative artist could not have painted a scene of death so truthfully. The odour arising from decaying bodies in the ground was at times almost overwhelming.
The sky is full of black and inky clouds, but from the low setting sun there pours an intense pale radiance, which lights up house-roofs, trees, and fields, with a white light; a flight of pigeons, wheeling high in the air, become brilliant specks of moving light upon a background of dark rolling vapour. What is the meaning of the intense and rapturous thrill that this sends through me?
The rain was driving pitilessly in my face, but I stumbled on in the inky darkness, often above my knees in thick clay mud. Several times I thought I should never reach the road. It was far worse than being under fire. I must have staggered along for about two miles when I perceived a light ahead. Never was sight more welcome.
They were intoning a rhythmic chant to which their bodies moved. The boat was slim and pointed; and the rowers looked like Vikings. The shadows cast by the moonlight were inky black, the shadows of the beaked ships, the shadows of the savage huts, of the ape-like men, of the huge round fish-baskets like immense amphorae.
Beyond that the inky canopy above and the forest surrounding seemed a solid wall. "It's going to be nasty traveling, Miss Weir," Roaring Bill spoke at her elbow. "I'll walk and lead the packs. You ride Silk. He's gentle. All you have to do is sit still, and he'll stay right behind the packs. I'll help you mount."
An octagonal occasional table, which carried a bronze statuette and a number of choice books, had been rudely overturned, and down the primrose paper of the wall inky fingers had been drawn, as it seemed for the mere pleasure of defilement. One of the delicate chintz curtains had been violently torn from its rings and thrust upon the fire, so that the smell of its smouldering filled the room.
I sat down while the Fijian gathered a pile of rotten wood, but before he could set fire to the heap I was on my feet clawing my way into the darkness in front. From somewhere out of the inky night came the voice of Edith Herndon lifted up in a little Italian melody that I had heard her singing the night we left Levuka.
It became inky black about me, not a ray from above came down into that darkness, and the phosphorescent things grew brighter and brighter. The snaky branches of the deeper weeds flickered like the flames of spirit-lamps; but, after a time, there were no more weeds. The fishes came staring and gaping towards me, and into me and through me. I never imagined such fishes before.
With a like inky swiftness did gossip now blacken the reputation of the Rev. Amos Barton, causing the unfriendly to scorn and even the friendly to stand aloof, at a time when difficulties of another kind were fast thickening around him. One November morning, at least six months after the Countess Czerlaski had taken up her residence at the vicarage, Mrs. Hackit heard that her neighbour Mrs.
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