In two minutes I was standing out of doors, with a rug about my shoulders, in a blackness that was almost palpable. The bitter wind still blew a little, but the rain had stopped. The ground was frozen, and a light fall of snow crunched underfoot. Drawing the rug close about me, I groped my shivering way to the front of the yard, thinking of the misery and death that the cold must already have brought to earth, realizing, for the first time, how dependent human welfare is on the whims of nature.
For a few minutes I waited in the frozen darkness, and nothing happened. Then began a fantastic thing, a veritable storm in the ether!
A faint living light of violet—blessed dawn of reborn day!—came in the south; thin misty streamers of violet flame flashed through the unutterable midnight of the heavens! Violet fire flickered and burned in a pale and nebulous aurora that ran with lightning speed to the four corners of the heavens! It danced, it wavered, it marched in gleaming pointed lances of pulsing flame!
And then the violet became a ubiquitous lucent background for a weirdly glorious and terrible play of bright, coruscating tongues of polychromatic fire! Suddenly a great blade of vivid, flaming green cut through the glowing violet, flashed across the sky in amazing splendor, and burst into a hundred blazing globes of brilliant emerald, that rolled down misty tracks of flame to the horizon!
A flickering, many-tongued sheet of amber was born in the east, spread over the violet haze throughout the heavens, and died into a pale saffron sheet that slowly changed and warmed to a rich glow of rosy mist. And from it grew a flickering wall of serpent tongues of orange, and scarlet, and blue, that danced and spread, and wove themselves into a curious crown of throbbing flame at the zenith.
All that wild and astounding storm of flame was as still as the grave. The chill wind had died. The air was keen and quiet. The snow-covered earth lay vast about me, queerly lit by the changing colors in the sky. Even the sea was silent, but living in the wonder of reflected light. All the world was quiet—as if the sun had been utterly gone, and it had been frozen indeed!
Brighter scarlet and green and purple lights burst up about the horizon in great fountains of wonderful fire, and poured through the sky in cyclonic whirls of burning splendor! It was like some vast pyrotechnic display; but the fire filled the heavens, and shone with incredibly splendid, living radiance, of every color in the spectrum—the pure and dripping essence of molten light!
Thin, feathery tongues of soft prismatic colors, great bars of intense and vivid fire, huge and rippling sheets of blinding brilliance, vast globes and vague shapes of bright and mist-edged flame, all interwoven in a Titanic storm of throbbing, flashing, iridescent light—a whirlwind of coruscating flame, splendid as a cascade of rubies and diamonds sweeping down in a sunlit stream of molten gold! A pulsing mist of woven flaming rainbows!
And suddenly there came a spot of pure, supernal blue at the zenith! Wonderful sight! It spread in a growing circle of blessed light! In a moment the last faint tinge of crimson fire was fading on the northern horizon! The skies were blue again!
The sun was far past the meridian! It had been hidden thirty hours! Its clear warm rays poured over the snow-clad landscape, sparkling in white brilliance on the frost and dancing on the silent sea. It was wonderful to see the world again in daylight, to feel the genial warmth of the restored sun!