My hand all the while had been in his, and to let him know where it was,
it moved. But cold fear stopped my talking.

"My child, I have not been kind to you," my father slowly spoke again,
"but it has not been from want of love. Some day you will see all this,
and some day you will pardon me."

He laid one heavy arm around me, and forgetting thirst and pain, with
the last intensity of eyesight watched the sun departing. To me, I know
not how, great awe was every where, and sadness. The conical point of
the furious sun, which like a barb had pierced us, was broadening into
a hazy disk, inefficient, but benevolent. Underneath him depth of night
was waiting to come upward (after letting him fall through) and stain
his track with redness. Already the arms of darkness grew in readiness
to receive him: his upper arc was pure and keen, but the lower was
flaked with atmosphere; a glow of hazy light soon would follow, and one
bright glimmer (addressed more to the sky than to the earth), and after
that a broad, soft gleam; and after that how many a man should never see
the sun again, and among them would be my father.

He, for the moment, resting there, with heavy light upon him, and the
dark jaws of the mountain desert yawning wide behind him, and all the
beautiful expanse of liberal earth before him--even so he seemed to me,
of all the things in sight, the one that first would draw attention.
His face was full of quiet grandeur and impressive calm, and the sad
tranquillity which comes to those who know what human life is through
continual human death. Although, in the matter of bodily strength, he
was little past the prime of life, his long and abundant hair was white,
and his broad and upright forehead marked with the meshes of the net