Page:H. D. Traill - From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier.djvu/227

 in one of those storm-laden hours when "wildly dashed on tower and tree, The sunbeam strikes along the world." Only they are thrice as vividly outlined, thrice as solidly projected against their background of earth or sky.

During this reillumining of the landscape the deep orange of the western horizon has glowed steadily and undimmed; but meanwhile the quarter of the heaven lying immediately above it has undergone an astonishing change. "God made himself an awful rose of dawn," wrote Tennyson in the "Vision of Sin," and fastidious critics have been known to object alike to the figure and to the phrase—to the imagery as false, and to the expression as affected. Yet all but the last two words of the description might be applied with perfect truth and sobriety to the afterglow of a sunset on the Nile. For slowly during all this time there has been ascending from the skyline of the desert as its base, and to an altitude of full thirty degrees above it,