Page:Anderson--Isle of seven moons.djvu/403

Rh fumes; gigantic geysers sprayed the zenith with white cascades; and red rivers flowed in swift destruction down the green terraces Ben had so often roved.

But most fearful of all were the vivid lightnings that like the invisible hand on the ancient walls of Babylon, wrote on the massing clouds their warnings in fiery, swift-vanishing script.

Set and stern was the captain's face, as his fingers held to the spokes, and he peered ahead through the straining ropes and the flying scud at the grey surface that heaved so it was almost breast to breast with the sky. But he held the North Star to her course, and they rode out the storm

Leagues northward, a strange thing befell. They sailed into a little calm, as sweet and refreshing to the weary sailors as an oasis to travellers after the sand-storms of the Sahara.

Around them, the sea and sky were blue, and silver, and serene, once more; the sun, at his setting, jubilant and rosy; and in his golden wake, the evening star throbbed like a lover's heart at the first meeting.

Far away, near the last line of the horizon, hovered a pall of smoke above a dark smudge, the last they were to see of it—of the Island of Seven Moons. And the girl thought that now and then she could see them—the full seven, still circling through the haze, shining like pale gold, with beams falling from them like faintest lightnings. At last they went out, but these threads continued to glow like the filaments of a globe after the current fails.

She plucked Ben's sleeve.

"There, it does look like the veil that Spanish Dick told