And our sunset to-night--I am writing this at midnight, as I sit
propped in my blankets, wedged by pillows, while the Elsinore wallows
damnably in a dead calm and a huge swell rolling up from the Cape
Horn region, where, it does seem, gales perpetually blow. But our
sunset. Turner might have perpetrated it. The west was as if a
painter had stood off and slapped brushfuls of gray at a green
canvas. On this green background of sky the clouds spilled and
crumpled.

But such a background! Such an orgy of green! No shade of green was
missing in the interstices, large and small, between the milky,
curdled clouds--Nile-green high up, and then, in order, each with a
thousand shades, blue-green, brown-green, grey-green, and a wonderful
olive-green that tarnished into a rich bronze-green.

During the display the rest of the horizon glowed with broad bands of
pink, and blue, and pale green, and yellow. A little later, when the
sun was quite down, in the background of the curdled clouds
smouldered a wine-red mass of colour, that faded to bronze and tinged
all the fading greens with its sanguinary hue. The clouds themselves
flushed to rose of all shades, while a fan of gigantic streamers of
pale rose radiated toward the zenith. These deepened rapidly into
flaunting rose-flame and burned long in the slow-closing twilight.

And with all this wonder of the beauty of the world still glowing in
my brain hours afterward, I hear the snarling of Mr. Pike above my
head, and the trample and drag of feet as the men move from rope to
rope and pull and haul. More weather is making, and from the way
sail is being taken in it cannot be far off.