DESERT SKY AND CLOUDS
[Sidenote: Commonplace things of nature.]
[Sidenote: The blue sky.]
How silently, even swiftly, the days glide by out in the desert, in
the waste, in the wilderness! How “the morning and the evening make up
the day” and the purple shadow slips in between with a midnight all
stars! And how day by day the interest grows in the long overlooked
commonplace things of nature! In a few weeks we are studying bushes,
bowlders, stones, sand-drifts--things we never thought of looking at
in any other country. And after a time we begin to make mental notes
on the changes of light, air, clouds, and blue sky. At first we are
perhaps bothered about the intensity of the sky, for we have always
heard of the “deep blue” that overhangs the desert; and we expect to
see it at any and all times. But we discover that it shows itself in
its greatest depth only in the morning before sunrise. Then it is a
dark blue, bordering upon purple; and for some time after the sun comes
up it holds a deep blue tinge. At noon it has passed through a whole
gamut of tones and is pale blue, yellowish, lilac-toned, or rosy; in
the late afternoon it has changed again to pink or gold or orange; and
after twilight and under the moon, warm purples stretch across the
whole reach of the firmament from horizon to horizon.
[Sidenote: Changes in the blue.]
[Sidenote: Dawns on the desert.]
But the changes in the blue during the day have no constancy to a
change. There is no fixed purpose about them. The caprices of light,
heat, and dust control the appearances. Sometimes the sky at dawn is
as pallid as a snow-drop with pearly grays just emerging from the
blue; and again it may be flushed with saffron, rose, and pink. When
there are clouds and great heat the effect is often very brilliant.
The colors are intense in chrome-yellows, golds, carmines, magentas,
malachite-greens--a body of gorgeous hues upheld by enormous side
wings of paler tints that encircle the horizon to the north and south,
and send waves of color far up the sky to the cool zenith. Such dawns
are seldom seen in moist countries, nor are they usual on the desert,
except during the hot summer months.
[Sidenote: Blue as a color.]
The prevailing note of the sky, the one oftenest seen, is, of course,
blue--a color we may not perhaps linger over because it is so common.
And yet how seldom it is appreciated! Our attention is called to it
in art--in a hawthorn jar as large as a sugar-bowl, made in a certain
period, in a certain Oriental school. The æsthetic world is perhaps set
agog by this ceramic blue. But what are its depth and purity compared
to the ethereal blue! Yet the color is beautiful in the jar and
infinitely more beautiful in the sky--that is beautiful in itself and
merely as color. It is not necessary that it should mean anything. Line
and tint do not always require significance to be beautiful. There is
no tale or text or testimony to be tortured out of the blue sky. It is
a splendid body of color; no more.
[Sidenote: Sky from mountain heights.]
[Sidenote: The night sky.]
You cannot always see the wonderful quality of this sky-blue from the
desert valley, because it is disturbed by reflections, by sand-storms,
by lower air strata. The report it makes of itself when you begin to
gain altitude on a mountain’s side is quite different. At four thousand
feet the blue is certainly more positive, more intense, than at
sea-level; at six thousand feet it begins to darken and deepen, and it
seems to fit in the saddles and notches of the mountains like a block
of lapis lazuli; at eight thousand feet it has darkened still more and
has a violet hue about it. The night sky at this altitude is almost
weird in its purples. A deep violet fits up close to the rim of the
moon, and the orb itself looks like a silver wafer pasted upon the sky.
[Sidenote: Blackness of space.]
The darkening of the sky continues as the height increases. If one
could rise to, say, fifty thousand feet, he would probably see the
sun only as a shining point of light, and the firmament merely as a
blue-black background. The diffusion of light must decrease with the
growing thinness of the atmospheric envelope. At what point it would
cease and the sky become perfectly black would be difficult to say, but
certainly the limit would be reached when our atmosphere practically
ceased to exist. Space from necessity must be black except where the
straight beams of light stream from the sun and the stars.
[Sidenote: Bright sky-colors.]
[Sidenote: Horizon skies.]
The bright sky-colors, the spectacular effects, are not to be found
high up in the blue of the dome. The air in the zenith is too thin, too
free from dust, to take deep colorings of red and orange. Those colors
belong near the earth, along the horizons where the aërial envelope is
dense. The lower strata of atmosphere are in fact responsible for the
gorgeous sunsets, the tinted hazes, the Indian-summer skies, the hot
September glows. These all appear in their splendor when the sun is
near the horizon-line and its beams are falling through the many miles
of hot, dust-laden air that lie along the surface of the earth. The air
at sunset after a day of intense heat-radiation is usually so thick
that only the long and strong waves of color can pass through it. The
blues are almost lost, the neutral tints are missing, the greens are
seen but faintly. The waves of red and yellow are the only ones that
travel through the thick air with force. And these are the colors that
tell us the story of the desert sunset.
[Sidenote: Spectrum colors.]
[Sidenote: Bands of yellow.]
[Sidenote: The orange sky.]
Ordinarily the sky at evening over the desert, when seen without
clouds, shows the colors of the spectrum beginning with red at the
bottom and running through the yellows, greens, and blues up to
the purple of the zenith. In cool weather, however, this spectrum
arrangement seems swept out of existence by a broad band of
yellow-green that stretches half way around the circle. It is a pale
yellow fading into a pale green, which in turn melts into a pale
blue. In hot weather this pallor is changed to something much richer
and deeper. A band of orange takes its place. It is a flame-colored
orange, and its hue is felt in reflection upon valley, plain, and
mountain peak. This indeed is the orange light that converts the air in
the mountain canyons into golden mist, and is measurably responsible
for the yellow sun-shafts that, streaming through the pinnacles of the
western mountains, reach far across the upper sky in ever-widening
bands. This great orange belt is lacking in that variety and vividness
of coloring that comes with clouds, but it is not wanting in a splendor
of its own. It is the broadest, the simplest, and in many respects the
sublimest sunset imaginable--a golden dream with the sky enthroned in
glory and the earth at its feet reflecting its lustre.
[Sidenote: Desert clouds.]
[Sidenote: Rainfall.]
But the more brilliant sunsets are only seen when there are broken
translucent clouds in the west. There are cloudy days even on the
desert. After many nights of heat, long skeins of white stratus will
gather along the horizons, and out of them will slowly be woven forms
of the cumulus and the nimbus. And it will rain in short squalls of
great violence on the lomas, mesas, and bordering mountains. But
usually the cloud that drenches a mountain top eight thousand feet up
will pass over an intervening valley, pouring down the same flood of
rain, and yet not a drop of it reaching the ground. The air is always
dry and the rain-drop that has to fall through eight thousand feet
of it before reaching the earth, never gets there. It is evaporated
and carried up to its parent cloud again. During the so-called “rainy
season” you may frequently see clouds all about the horizon and
overhead that are “raining”--letting down long tails and sheets of rain
that are plainly visible; but they never touch the earth. The sheet
lightens, breaks, and dissipates two thousand feet up. It rains, true
enough, but there is no water, just as there are desert rivers, but
they have no visible stream. That is the desert of it both above and
below.
[Sidenote: Effect of the nimbus.]
With the rain come trooping almost all the cloud-forms known to the
sky. And the thick ones like the nimbus carry with them a chilling,
deadening effect. The rolls and sheets of rain-clouds that cover
the heavens at times rob the desert of light, air, and color at one
fell swoop. Its beauty vanishes as by magic. Instead of colored haze
there is gray gloom settling along the hills and about the mesas. The
sands lose their lustre and become dull and formless, the vegetation
darkens to a dead gray, and the mountains turn slate-colored, mouldy,
unwholesome looking. A mantle of drab envelops the scene, and the glory
of the desert has departed.
[Sidenote: Cumuli.]
[Sidenote: Heap clouds at sunset.]
All the other cloud-forms, being more or less transparent, seem to aid
rather than to obscure the splendor of the sky. The most common clouds
of all are the cumuli. In hot summer afternoons they gather and heap
up in huge masses with turrets and domes of light that reach at times
forty thousand feet above the earth. At sunset they begin to show color
before any of the other clouds. If seen against the sun their edges at
first gleam silver-white and then change to gold; if along the horizon
to the north or south, or lying back in the eastern sky, they show
dazzling white like a snowy Alp. As the sun disappears below the line
they begin to warm in color, turning yellow, pink, and rose. Finally
they darken into lilac and purple, then sink and disappear entirely.
The smaller forms of cumulus that appear in the west at evening are
always splashes of sunset color, sometimes being shot through with
yellow or scarlet. They ultimately appear floating against the night
sky as spots of purple and gray.
[Sidenote: Strati.]
Above the cumuli and often flung across them like bands of gauze, are
the strati--clouds of the middle air region. This veil or sheet-cloud
might be called a twilight cloud, giving out as it does its greatest
splendor after the sun has disappeared below the verge. It then takes
all colors and with singular vividness. At times it will overspread
the whole west as a sheet of brilliant magenta, but more frequently
it blares with scarlet, carmine, crimson, flushing up and then fading
out, shifting from one color to another; and finally dying out in a
beautiful ashes of roses. When these clouds and all their variations
have faded into lilac and deep purples, there are still bright spots of
color in the upper sky where the cirri are receiving the last rays of
the sun.
[Sidenote: Cirri.]
[Sidenote: Ice-clouds.]
The cirrus with its many feathery and fleecy forms is the thinnest, the
highest, and the most brilliant in light of all the clouds. Perhaps its
brilliancy is due to its being an ice-cloud. It seems odd that here
in the desert with so much heat rising and tempering the upper air
there should be clouds of ice but a few miles above it. The cirrus and
also the higher forms of the cumulo-stratus are masses of hoar-frost,
spicules of ice floating in the air, instead of tiny globules of vapor.
[Sidenote: Clouds of fire.]
[Sidenote: The celestial tapestry.]
There is nothing remarkable about the desert clouds--that is nothing
very different from the clouds of other countries--except in light,
color, and background. They appear incomparably more brilliant and
fiery here than elsewhere on the globe. The colors, like everything
else on the desert, are intense in their power, fierce in their glare.
They vibrate, they scintillate, they penetrate and tinge everything
with their hue. And then, as though heaping splendor upon splendor,
what a wonderful background they are woven upon! Great bands of orange,
green, and blue that all the melted and fused gems in the world could
not match for translucent beauty. Taken as a whole, as a celestial
tapestry, as a curtain of flame drawn between night and day, and what
land or sky can rival it!
[Sidenote: The desert moon.]
[Sidenote: Rings and rainbows.]
After the clouds have all shifted into purples and the western sky
has sunk into night, then up from the east the moon--the misshapen
orange-hued desert moon. How large it looks! And how it warms the sky,
and silvers the edges of the mountain peaks, and spreads its wide light
across the sands! Up, up it rises, losing something of its orange
and gaining something in symmetry. In a few hours it is high in the
heavens and has a great aureole of color about it. Look at the ring
for a moment and you will see all the spectrum colors arranged in
order. Pale hues they are but they are all there. Rainbows by day and
rainbows by night! Radiant circles of colored light--not one but many.
Arches above arches--not two or three but five solar bows in the sky
at one time! What strange tales come out of the wilderness! But how
much stranger, how much more weird and extraordinary the things that
actually happen in this desert land.
[Sidenote: Moonlight.]
[Sidenote: Stars.]
High in the zenith rides the desert moon. What a flood of light comes
from it! What pale, phosphorescent light! Under it miles and miles of
cactus and grease wood are half revealed, half hidden; and far away
against the dark mountains the dunes of the desert shine white as
snow-clad hills in December. The stars are forth, the constellations
in their places, the planets large and luminous, yet none of them has
much color or sparkle. The moon dims them somewhat, but even without
the moon they have not the twinkle of the stars in higher, colder
latitudes. The desert air seems to veil their lustre somewhat, and yet
as points of light set in that purple dome of sky how beautiful they
are!
[Sidenote: The midnight sky.]
[Sidenote: Alone in the desert.]
Lying down there in the sands of the desert, alone and at night, with
a saddle for your pillow, and your eyes staring upward at the stars,
how incomprehensible it all seems! The immensity and the mystery are
appalling; and yet how these very features attract the thought and
draw the curiosity of man. In the presence of the unattainable and the
insurmountable we keep sending a hope, a doubt, a query, up through the
realms of air to Saturn’s throne. What key have we wherewith to unlock
that door? We cannot comprehend a tiny flame of our own invention
called electricity, yet we grope at the meaning of the blazing splendor
of Arcturus. Around us stretches the great sand-wrapped desert whose
mystery no man knows, and not even the Sphinx could reveal; yet beyond
it, above it, upward still upward, we seek the mysteries of Orion and
the Pleiades.
[Sidenote: The mysteries.]
[Sidenote: Space and immensity.]
What is it that draws us to the boundless and the fathomless? Why
should the lovely things of earth--the grasses, the trees, the lakes,
the little hills--appear trivial and insignificant when we come face to
face with the sea or the desert or the vastness of the midnight sky?
Is it that the one is the tale of things known and the other merely a
hint, a suggestion of the unknown? Or have immensity, space, magnitude
a peculiar beauty of their own? Is it not true that bulk and breadth
are primary and essential qualities of the sublime in landscape? And
is it not the sublime that we feel in immensity and mystery? If so,
perhaps we have a partial explanation of our love for sky and sea and
desert waste. They are the great elements. We do not see, we hardly
know if their boundaries are limited; we only feel their immensity,
their mystery, and their beauty.
[Sidenote: The silences.]
And quite as impressive as the mysteries are the silences. Was there
ever such a stillness as that which rests upon the desert at night! Was
there ever such a hush as that which steals from star to star across
the firmament! You perhaps think to break the spell by raising your
voice in a cry; but you will not do so again. The sound goes but a
little way and then seems to come back to your ear with a suggestion of
insanity about it.
[Sidenote: The cry of the human.]
A cry in the night! Overhead the planets in their courses make no
sound, the earth is still, the very animals are mute. Why then the
cry of the human? How it jars the harmonies! How it breaks in discord
upon the unities of earth and air and sky! Century after century that
cry has gone up, mobbing high heaven; and always insanity in the cry,
insanity in the crier. What folly to protest where none shall hear!
There is no appeal from the law of nature. It was made for beast and
bird and creeping thing. Will the human never learn that in the eye of
the law he is not different from the things that creep?