... Assuredly the city of St. Pierre never could have seemed more
quaintly beautiful than as I saw it on the evening of my return, while
the shadows were reaching their longest, and sea and sky were turning
lilac. Palm-heads were trembling and masts swaying slowly against an
enormous orange sunset,--yet the beauty of the sight did not touch me!
The deep level and luminous flood of the bay seemed to me for the first
time a dead water;--I found myself wondering whether it could form a
part of that living tide by which I had been dwelling, full of
foam-lightnings and perpetual thunder. I wondered whether the air about
me--heavy and hot and full of faint smells--could ever have been touched
by the vast pure sweet breath of the wind from the sunrising. And I
became conscious of a profound, unreasoning, absurd regret for the
somnolent little black village of that bare east coast,--where there are
no woods, no ships, no sunset,... only the ocean roaring forever over
its beach of black sand.
[Illustration]