There was silence too—such wonderful silence, one could hear one's own heart beating. Such a morning was indeed what Richter calls a "still-creation-day," that still silence of the heart that prefaces new revelation, as the brooding of the dove on the waters the creation of a world. You must know I saw the dawn, and have been with the sun all day. I slept at a Greek coffee-house, but was up whilst the sky was yet dark and the waves all cloudy purple. There was just one gleam of light in the dark sky, just one little promise. The great cliffs were all in their night cloaks, and night shapes were on the road. All Nature was in the night world, and I felt as if I were continuing my last night's tramping, and not starting upon a new day. Yet in the night of my heart was also just that one gleam of whiteness in the East, one little promise. I knew the whiteness must get more and more, and the darkness less and less. I stood on the cliff road and watched the waves become all alive, playing with their shadows as the light diffused in the sky, and the white lines of the East turned to rosy ribbons. Then the dawn twilight came and the night shapes slunk away. The Tartars and Greeks took down their shutters in the little village hard by.
The sea became green, the rocks all grey, and then, as I watched, the rim of the sun rose over the horizon and the sea held it as a scimitar of fire. The white disc rose, a miracle; it looked very large, as if it had grown bigger in the night. It paused a moment in the sea and then suddenly seemed to bound up from it: it flooded the world with light. Then, as if from his hands angels were leaping, thousands of gulls were descried on the sea, their gleaming wings seeming to be the very meaning of morning. Out of the sea under the dawn, dark dolphins came leaping toward the shore. The sea became a grey expanse over which the sun made a silver roadway. There commenced the quiet, quiet morning, and the still-creation-day.
Now the day is ending, and the sun goes down behind the hills at Yalta, the mist bank over the southern horizon catches the reflection of true sunset tints, and transmits them to the velvety water, full of light-rings. I have been sitting on a pleasure seat on the sand all the afternoon, and now I go to the end of the long pier. There one may see another vision of the mystery of the day, for the sea-waves are full of living autumn colours, of luminous withered leaves and faded rose petals; they are still living velvet, the night garment of a queen. Black ducks are swimming mysteriously on the glowing dusky water.
In a moment, however, the scene has changed and the colours have been withdrawn. The presence in the world, the queen whom we call Day, has passed over the waves and disappeared; not even a fold of the long train of her dress is visible.
Some one has lighted a Roman candle at the far end of the pier, as a signal to a steamer whose white and red lanterns have just been descried upon the dark horizon. It is night: the day is over.
VIII
SUNSET FROM THE GATE OF BAIDARI
It was at the Gate of Baidari in the Crimea on the shortest day of the year that I saw the most wonderful sunset I have ever known, and entered most completely into the spirit of the dark, quiet night.
It was another vision of the sea, a presentment of the sea's question in a new light.
A mild December afternoon. I had been some days wandering across pleasant tree-brown valleys and immense hollows mountain-walled. In the winter silence there was no murmur of the ocean, not even was there saltness in the air. I was out of the sight of the sea and had been so for several days. But this afternoon I climbed by a long road where were many berberry bushes vermilion with their berries, up to the pass over the hills, and there all at once by surprise, without the least expecting it, at a turn of the road I had a revelation of the whole sea.