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shepherd's cot. Here and there pale spiral vortices might be seen, which
were whirls of fine snow, snatched from the ground by the wind and blown
away. Successive undulations of ground, become suddenly misty, rolled
themselves into the horizon. The great dull plains were lost under the
white fog. Deep silence. It spread like infinity, and was hush as the
tomb.
The child turned again towards the sea.
The sea, like the land, was white--the one with snow, the other with
foam. There is nothing so melancholy as the light produced by this
double whiteness.
Certain lights of night are very clearly cut in their hardness; the sea
was like steel, the cliff like ebony. From the height where the child
was the bay of Portland appeared almost like a geographical map, pale,
in a semicircle of hills. There was something dreamlike in that
nocturnal landscape--a wan disc belted by a dark crescent. The moon
sometimes has a similar appearance. From cape to cape, along the whole
coast, not a single spark indicating a hearth with a fire, not a lighted
window, not an inhabited house, was to be seen. As in heaven, so on
earth--no light. Not a lamp below, not a star above. Here and there came
sudden risings in the great expanse of waters in the gulf, as the wind
disarranged and wrinkled the vast sheet. The hooker was still visible in
the bay as she fled.
It was a black triangle gliding over the livid waters.
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