The dogs shared just as if they had been part of the crew. So they were for that matter.
The wind fell off as the sun sank behind the snowy mountains, fell off and off, till we were becalmed. Then I gave the orders—
“In sail,” and “out oars.”
After spanking along under sail for so long a time as we had done, to be reduced to rowing seems dreary work. However, there is nothing like the sea for teaching one patience, so we did not murmur.
The sunset was gorgeous enough, in all conscience, and played all sorts of fantastic tricks of colouring among the snowy cliffs, peaks, and glaciers, making a picture such as few artists could, if they would, produce on canvas, or would dare to if they could.
As we had nothing else to do, Jill and I sat silently staring at the ever changing sky, with as much inward pleasure as ever child gazed upon the flowers in a kaleidoscope.
Even after the sun had set entirely, the sky was wondrous in its beauty. It seemed to me as if the artist Nature, whom we all try to copy, were mixing her colours to commence some great new work, and that the sky was her palette.
But that palette itself was a picture, oh how grand and solemn! First we had the sea, darkling now under the shadows of the giant hill, yet borrowing tints from the clouds. Then the wild wooded cliffs, and pointed rocks looking almost black against the background of snow and ice rising up, and up, and up its sharpest lines, softened till it ended in the rugged serrated horizon.
High up in the heavens, where in the rifts the sky could be seen, it was of a light cerulean blue, pure, ethereal, the grey clouds in bars and piles, still the same shaped bars of cloud lower down; but here the rifts of sky were of an ineffably lovely tint of pale sea green, and the clouds were purple, while all along the horizon the naked sky was of the deepest orange, almost approaching to crimson, all aglow with light.
Even as we gazed, a change came over the spirit of the scene; for the green rifts changed to a milky white, with a hazy blush of crimson floating over it, borrowed from the splendour beneath and beyond.