His fiery face in billows of the west,
And his faint steedes watered in ocean deepe
Whiles from his journall labours he did rest.”
Although the surface of the sea is quite smooth, a heavy ground swell keeps rolling along. A bank of violet cloud lies to the left of the sun, while dense masses of leaden and purple-coloured clouds are piled above it. An opening glows like a furnace seven times heated, darting rays from its central fire athwart the sky, and opening up a burning cone-shaped pathway of light on the smooth heaving billows, the apex of which reaches our prow.
Such the scene, as we sail north-west between the northernmost out-lying skerries of the Westmanna group and the south-west coast of Iceland and silently watch the gorgeous hues of sunset. Strangely at such times “hope and memory sweep the chords by turns,” till the past, fused down into the present, becomes a magic mirror for the future.
The air is mild and warm; time by Greenwich twenty-minutes to eleven. The sun is not yet quite down, and—by the ship’s compass, without making any allowance for deviation—is setting due north. At a quarter-past 12 A.M. when we leave the deck, it is still quite light.
CAPE REYKJANES LOOKING SOUTH.
COAST NEAR REYKJAVIK.