But he didn't say for what because they came to where they saw above the cloud-wrapt city the glory of chrysoprase, turquoise, and topaz which precedes the sunrise and takes the breath away.
"Oh, look!"
"Oh, look!"
Instinctively they clasped hands as they stood on the edge of the flowery precipice, watching the chrysoprase yellow into saffron, and the turquoise melt into sapphire, while the topaz became light.
Then silently, above the wraithlike towers and cubes and battlements, slipped the rim of gold.
"There it is, Bob!"
He drew her to him, holding her close.
"Yes; there it is again, Jennie—always coming back to us! The last time we were here we had only the moonrise; and now it is the sun—the sun!"
Her head lay against his shoulder; and as the rim became an orb the cloud-built vision of Manhattan was touched with flecks of fire. Within its heart lay Broadway, Fifth Avenue, Wall Street, and the Bowery, shops, churches, brothels, and banks, all passions, hungers, yearnings, and ambitions, all national impulses worthy and detestable, all human instincts holy and unclean, all loveliness, all lust, all charity, all cupidity, all secret and suppressed desire, all shameless exposure on the housetops, all sorrow, all sin, all that the soul of man conceives of as evil and good—and yet, with no more than these few miles of perspective, and this easy play of light, translated into beauty, uplifting, unearthly, and ineffable.