Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard
the eastern sky. The doctor walked briskly. A darkling shadow seemed to fall upon him from the zenith. The sun had set. For a time the snows of Higuerota continued to glow with the reflected glory of the west. The doctor, holding a straight course for the custom-house, appeared lonely, hopping among the dark bushes like a tall bird with a broken wing.
Tints of purple, gold, and crimson were mirrored in the clear water of the harbor. A long tongue of land, straight as a wall, with the grass-grown ruins of the fort making a sort of rounded green mound, plainly le from the inner shore, closed its circuit; and beyond, the Placid Gulf repeated those splendors of coloring on a greater scale with a more sombre magnificence. The great mass of cloud filling the head of the gulf had long, red smears among its convoluted folds of gray and black, as of a floating mantle stained with blood. The three Isabels, overshadowed and clear-cut in a great smoothness confounding the sea and sky, appeared suspended, purple-black, in the air. The little wavelets seemed to be tossing tiny red sparks upon the sandy beaches. The glassy bands of water along the horizon gave out a fiery red glow, as if fire and water had been mingled together in the vast bed of the ocean.
At last the conflagration of sea and sky, lying embraced and asleep in a flaming contact upon the edge of the world, went out. The red sparks in the water vanished, together with the stains of blood in the black mantle draping the sombre head of the Placid Gulf; and a sudden breeze sprang up and died out after rustling heavily the growth of bushes on the ruined
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