"'As I've found out . .
Beyond a doubt,"


Mr. Pike hummed from Newcomb's Celeste, as he went down the ladder.



CHAPTER XXIX



The sunsets grow more bizarre and spectacular off this coast of the
Argentine. Last evening we had high clouds, broken white and golden,
flung disorderly, generously, over the western half of the sky, while
in the east was painted a second sunset--a reflection, perhaps, of
the first. At any rate, the eastern sky was a bank of pale clouds
that shed soft, spread rays of blue and white upon a blue-grey sea.

And the evening before last we had a gorgeous Arizona riot in the
west. Bastioned upon the ocean cloud-tier was piled upon cloud-tier,
spacious and lofty, until we gazed upon a Grand Canyon a myriad times
vaster and more celestial than that of the Colorado. The clouds took
on the same stratified, serrated, rose-rock formation, and all the
hollows were filled with the opal blues and purple hazes of the
Painted Lands.

The Sailing Directions say that these remarkable sunsets are due to
the dust being driven high into the air by the winds that blow across
the pampas of the Argentine.