It may well be imagined that we did not lose
any time. We snatched on a few odds and ends of clothing,
cocooned ourselves in the proper red blankets, and plunged
along the halls and out into the whistling wind bareheaded.
We saw a tall wooden scaffolding on the very peak
of the summit, a hundred yards away, and made for it.
We rushed up the stairs to the top of this scaffolding,
and stood there, above the vast outlying world, with hair
flying and ruddy blankets waving and cracking in the fierce
breeze.
"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 at 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."
"And have you done any better, I'd like to know?
