“Fifteen minutes too late, at last!” said Harris, in a vexed voice. “The sun is clear above the horizon.”
“No matter,” I said, “it is a most magnificent spectacle, and we will see it do the rest of its rising anyway.”
In a moment we were deeply absorbed in the marvel before us, and dead to everything else. The great cloud-barred disk of the sun stood just above a limitless expanse of tossing white-caps—so to speak—a billowy chaos of massy mountain domes and peaks draped in imperishable snow, and flooded with an opaline glory of changing and dissolving splendors, while through rifts in a black cloud-bank above the sun, radiating lances of diamond dust shot to the zenith. The cloven valleys of the lower world swam in a tinted mist which veiled the ruggedness of their crags and ribs and ragged forests, and turned all the forbidding region into a soft and rich and sensuous paradise.
We could not speak. We could hardly breathe. We could only gaze in drunken ecstasy and drink in it. Presently Harris exclaimed:
“Why—nation, it’s going down!”
Perfectly true. We had missed the morning hornblow, and slept all day. This was stupefying.
Harris said:
“Look here, the sun isn’t the spectacle—it’s us—stacked up here on top of this gallows, in these idiotic blankets, and two hundred and fifty well-dressed men and women down here gawking up at us and not caring a straw whether the sun rises or sets, as long as they’ve got such a ridiculous spectacle as this to set down in their memorandum-books. They seem to be laughing their ribs loose, and there’s one girl there that appears to be going all to pieces. I never saw such a man as you before. I think you are the very last possibility in the way of an ass.”
“What have I done?” I answered, with heat.
“What have you done? You’ve got up at half past seven o’clock in the evening to see the sun rise, that’s what you’ve done.”