But on that evening I was sitting in the dining room which, when the tables were cleared, was a kind of general family living room, when Charlie came to me with his angelic smile.
"The captain, he say you please come on deck right away."
I went up the companionway and stepped out upon the deck; and there in the north, across the blue, mist-softened sea, in the rich splendor of an Aleutian sunset, trembled and glowed the exquisite thing of my desire.
In the absolute perfection of its conical form, its chaste and delicate beauty of outline, and the slender column of smoke pushing up from its finely pointed crest, Shishaldin stands alone. Its height is not great, only nine thousand feet; but in any company of loftier mountains it would shine out with a peerlessness that would set it apart.
The sunset trembled upon the North Pacific Ocean, changing hourly as the evening wore on. Through scarlet and purple and gold, the mountain shone; through lavender, pearl, and rose; growing ever more distant and more dim, but not less beautiful. At last, it could barely be seen, in a flood of rich violet mist, just touched with rose.
So steadily I looked, and with such a longing passion of greeting, rapture, possession, and farewell in my gaze and in my heart, that lo! when its last outline had blurred lingeringly and sweetly into the rose-violet mist, I found that it was painted in all its delicacy of outline and soft splendor of coloring upon my memory. There it burns to-day in all its loveliness as vividly as it burned that night, ere it faded, line by line, across the widening sea. It is mine. I own it as surely as I own the green hill upon which I live, the blue sea that sparkles daily beneath my windows, the gold-brilliant constellations that move nightly above my home, or the song that the meadow-lark sings to his mate in the April dawn.
The sea breaks into surf upon Shishaldin's base, and snow covers the slender cone from summit to sea level, save for a month or two in summer when it melts around the base. Owing to the mists, it is almost impossible to obtain a sharp negative of Shishaldin from the water.
They played with it constantly. They wrapped soft rose-colored scarfs about its crest; they wound girdles of purple and gold and pearl about its middle; they set rayed gold upon it, like a crown. Now and then, for a few seconds at a time, they drew away completely, as if to contemplate its loveliness; and then, as if overcome and compelled by its dazzling brilliance, they flung themselves back upon it impetuously and crushed it for several moments completely from our view.
Large and small, the islands of the Aleutian Archipelago number about one hundred. They drift for nearly fifteen hundred miles from the point of the Aliaska Peninsula toward the Kamchatkan shore; and Attu, the last one, lies within the eastern hemisphere. This chain of islands, reaching as far west as the Komandórski, or Commander, Islands—upon one of which Commander Behring died and was buried—was named, in 1786, the Catherina Archipelago, by Forster, in honor of the liberal and enlightened Empress Catherine the Second, of Russia.