The Argosy — page 235: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

218 Letters from Majorca. Above and beyond this towers the Cathedral, its amber tone standing out in strong contrast with everything around it, an object of infinite grandeur. H.C. has sketched it from this point of view, and I enclose you the result. But itis amazingly hot up here. We seem to have got ever so many thousand miles nearer the sun than we were down below. Yet that sun is beginning to decline. Presently it sinks and disappears ; night follows. So does our Palma purgatory in the dining-room. So does our excellent witch’s brew: the cup that cheers but not inebriates. Then we stroll out under the night sky. We go down the street, and up the steps, and pass under the shadow of the great Cathedral to the fortifications bordering the sea. It is intensely dark, and I, who with so strong a sight by day have suffered from night-blindness from childhood upwards, can see nothing before me. It delights H. C. to lead me astray: for J am at his mercy. Now he has nearly plunged me over a precipice, and now I have almost knocked down a sentry, muffled up in a cloak as if it were so many degrees below freezing point. I apologize, and he excuses himself for having been in my path. These are delightful manners. From his bearing you would think he considered that in attempting to knock him down I had paid him a compliment or done him great honour. H. C. is amused in quite a boyish way, expands with suppressed laughter (I cannot for the life of me see anything funny in the situation), and suggests in a sort of Job’s-comfortor-tone that before long I shall find myself in the hands of the Inquisitorial Council. The night is glorious; the ramparts are deserted; we and the sentry have the whole extent to ourselves. Stars flash and blaze. One has no conception of sucha firmament in England. But I need not describe it to you, who have seen it in softer climes than that of Great Britain. The sea is stretched out before us, invisible, yet ever sounding. Here and there, a light upon its bosom shows some fishing craft at work. ‘That poor wreck is within a few yards of us. We feel its in- fluence though we cannot see it. Never again will it show port and starboard lights, or answer to its helm. Beside us the great Cathedral is outlined, darker than the dark- ness of the night; looking many times larger than in broad day ; a black, overwhelming, mysterious mass. We gaze and gaze untila creepy feeling takes hold of us. We feel molecules beside it ; atoms under all this expanse of sea and sky and starry world and eternity of space. It gives one a breathless, bewildered, /os¢ sensation. Whither does the soul, when summoned, wing its flight ? Below us an incline leading to mysterious archways admits one into the narrow streets of the town; streets peopled with the shades of many of the dead-and-gone nobility of Palma. Nothing else haunts them to-night, except here and there a flitting figure: a woman hurrying home, it may be, to complete the simple annals of CORMICMOOO;KS, (Eo)