and the clouds from far to the eastward up the wind massed
themselves on the island, and then ceased suddenly to leeward,
leaving the sky clear and the sea brilliant.

I should be glad to know the cause of this phenomenon, which we saw
several times among the islands, but never in greater perfection
than on nearing Nevis from the south on our return. In that case,
however, the cloud continued to leeward. It came up from the east
for full ten miles, an advancing column of tall ghostly cumuli,
leaden, above a leaden sea; and slid toward the island, whose lines
seemed to leap up once to meet them; fail; then, in a second leap,
to plunge the crater-peak high into the mist; and then to sink down
again into the western sea, so gently that the line of shore and sea
was indistinguishable. But above, the cloud-procession passed on,
shattered by its contact with the mountain, and transfigured as it
neared the setting sun into long upward streaming lines of rack,
purple and primrose against a saffron sky, while Venus lingered low
between cloud and sea, a spark of fire glittering through dull red
haze.

And now the steamer ran due south, across the vast basin which is
ringed round by Antigua, Montserrat, and Guadaloupe, with St. Kitts
and Nevis showing like tall gray ghosts to the north-west. Higher
and higher ahead rose the great mountain mass of Guadaloupe, its
head in its own canopy of cloud. The island falls into the sea
sharply to leeward. But it stretches out to windward in a long line
of flat land edged with low cliff, and studded with large farms and
engine-houses. It might be a bit of the Isle of Thanet, or of the
Lothians, were it not for those umbrella-like Palmistes, a hundred
feet high, which stand out everywhere against the sky. At its