United States or Guatemala ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Cara was a few paces ahead, flanked by Robin and the local doctor, who were each endeavouring to secure her undivided attention. She was looking very lovely, in an elusive frock of some ephemeral material veiling a delicate prismatic undertone of colour. She always dressed rather wonderfully, every detail perfect.
Near the far shore was a bare spot on the ice cut by one of the sleigh-runners. Up in the woods, opposite, was the Moss Trail. Sunlight fell on the hills above him. He halted, looking up at the tree-tops. Twig, branch, and trunk glowed with the fire of diamonds through a lacy necking of hoar frost. Every tree had put on a jacket of ice and become as a fountain of prismatic hues.
It was a cloudy day, yet the front glistened with prismatic splendor. What will it be, I asked myself, if in the afternoon the setting sun shall light it up? But we are too close to it for our own safety, we learn, and are slowly moved back half a mile, where our anchor is dropped and preparations are made to row us on shore to climb to the top of the glacier.
Where the light happened to fall upon these the effect was bewilderingly beautiful, the rays being reflected and refracted from and through the crystals of which they were composed until they shone and sparkled like columns of prismatic fire.
These red bands are sometimes prismatic, the small prisms being at right angles to the sheets of lava. Red clay or red marl, formed as above stated by the disintegration of lava, scoriae, or tuff, has often accumulated to a great thickness in the valleys of Madeira, being washed into them by alluvial action; and some of the thick beds of laterite in India may have had a similar origin.
As he spoke the picture became blurred and indistinct, prismatic colours began to come and go upon the curtain of vapour, and suddenly out flashed the image of a wide-stretching sun-lit plain, upon which were drawn up on parade, in illimitable perspective, a countless host of British troops, infantry, cavalry, and artillery, with bayonets, swords, and lance-points gleaming in the sun, with colours uncased, guns limbered up, and all apparently ready and waiting for the order to march.
It is brilliant, vivid, changeable with the interferences of light from the fluctuating surface above, which transmogrifies everything touches the coarsest objects with its pencil, and they become radiant and spiritual. A pile of brick, dumped carelessly on the deck, has become a huge hill of crystal jewelry, lively with brilliant prismatic radiance.
It would be a crime for which neither reason nor palliation could be found. Thus the prismatic hues which had surrounded this man began to fade, and Laura, who had hoped to escape the prose of life, was reluctantly compelled to admit to herself at times that she found her lover tiresomely prosy and "splendidly null."
The silence, broken by the rattling of the two bills in her mother's hands as she glanced from one to the other through her glasses, seemed suddenly impenetrable, and the prismatic world of the girl's rapture burst like a bubble against it. There is no explanation of the effect outside of temperament and overwrought sensibilities.
White luminous fogs, like curtains of gauze, too thin to dim the general brightness, yet dense enough to invest the whole scene with a silver robe of mystery, and to refract the light and compel it to shine in great circles of prismatic colours!
Word Of The Day