Pale things became livid,
holding apparently some under-brightness which partly penetrated its
envelope, but a brightness that was white and almost frightful. Black
things seemed to glow with blackness. The air quivered. Its silence
surely thrilled with sound--with sound that grew ever louder.
In the east I saw an effect. To the west I turned for the cause. The
sunset light was returning. Horus would not permit Tum to reign even
for a few brief moments, and Khuns, the sacred god of the moon, would be
witness of a conflict in that lovely western region of the ocean of the
sky where the bark of the sun had floated away beneath the mountain
rim upon the red-and-orange tides. The afterglow was like an exquisite
spasm, is always like an exquisite spasm, a beautiful, almost desperate
effort ending in the quiet darkness of defeat. And through that
spasmodic effort a world lived for some minutes with a life that seemed
unreal, startling, magical. Color returned to the sky--color ethereal,
trembling as if it knew it ought not to return. Yet it stayed for a
while and even glowed, though it looked always strangely purified,
and full of a crystal coldness. The birds that flew against it were no
longer birds, but dark, moving ornaments, devised surely by a supreme
artist to heighten here and there the beauty of the sky. Everything that
moved against the afterglow--man, woman, child, camel and donkey, dog
and goat, languishing buffalo, and plunging horse--became at once an
ornament, invented, I fancied, by a genius to emphasize, by relieving
it, the color in which the sky was drowned.
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