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Updated: September 3, 2025
"When you climb a hot, shadowless hillside, you sometimes find fruit to quench your torturing thirst; and I have found it here and now," said Lucien, as he sprang sobbing to d'Arthez's arms and kissed his friend on the forehead. "It seems to me that I am leaving my conscience in your keeping; some day I will come to you and ask for it again."
The whole sky from the zenith to the horizon becomes one molten mantling sea of colour and fire; every black bar turns into massy gold, every ripple and wave into unsullied shadowless crimson, and purple, and scarlet, and colours for which there are no words in language, and no ideas in the mind things which can only be conceived while they are visible; the intense hollow blue of the upper sky melting through it all, showing here deep, and pure, and lightless; there, modulated by the filmy formless body of the transparent vapour, till it is lost imperceptibly in its crimson and gold.
They were the verbatim reports of Stella Ballantyne's trial, which had been printed day by day in the Times of India. He had sent for them months ago when he had blithely taken upon himself the defence of Stella Ballantyne. He had read them with a growing ardour. So harshly had she lived; so shadowless was her innocence. He turned to them now in a different spirit.
Spelt with a capital S, it constituted her Deity; her heaven was a severe and shadowless eternity, and plain words were the flowers that grew in her Elysian fields. She had simplified her life and her looks. Even her smile was shorn of all accessories like dimples or twinkles. Her hair, which was not abundant, was the colour of corn, straight and shining. Her eyes were a cold dark grey.
Her eyes, very blue and shadowless, met his stare with a kind of bonhomie almost a Masonic understanding and the uncompromising antagonism that replied seemed to check her. She hesitated, then as he at last stood back, passed on still smiling, but mechanically, as though something had surprised her into forgetting why she smiled. Cosgrave followed her.
Far in the interior, almost on the edge of the great desert, in that terrible season when air that is flame by day is ice by night, and when the scorch of a blazing sun may be followed in an hour by the blinding fury of a snow-storm, the slaughter had gone on, hour through hour, under a shadowless sky, blue as steel, hard as a sheet of brass.
It climbed lazily to the zenith, and at noon we were shadowless. The sky was as calm as a vault, and the surface of the water was like burnished steel. The heat became so stifling that even the Africans were gasping for breath, and we envied them their freedom from all impediments. The least exertion was irksome, and attended with extreme lassitude.
The yellow wheat and stubble, the dull yellow of the waggon, toned down by years of weather, the green woods near at hand, darkening in the distance and slowly changing to blue, the cloudless sky, the heat-suffused atmosphere, in which things seem to float rather than to grow or stand, the shadowless field, all are there, and yet are not there, but far away and vision-like.
Otti took it, only half comprehending, but sure of its power. In a week, Otti's eyes were shadowless, her lips smiling, her pay-envelope bulging. But it was in Sophy Kumpf that the T. A. Buck Company best exemplified its policy. Sophy Kumpf had come to Buck's thirty years before, slim, pink-cheeked, brown-haired.
Let, then, a plaque or a picture be kept for hanging on shadowless clays. To dress a room once for all, and to give it no more heed, is to neglect the units of the days. Shadows within doors are yet only messages from that world of shadows which is the landscape of sunshine. Facing a May sun you see little except an infinite number of shadows.
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