The round horizon was brimming with a pale but magical colour,
welling up to the tips of trees and the battlements of white
towers. Earth seemed a mysterious cup overfull of this pigment of
wonder. Clouds wandering low, straying far from their azure
fields, were dipped in it. The towers of Lowlight turned slowly
rose in that light, and glowed together with the infinite
gloaming, so that for this brief hour the things of man were wed
with the things of eternity. It was into this wide, pale flame of
aetherial rose that the moon came stealing like a magician on tip-
toe, to enchant the tips of the trees, low clouds and the towers
of Lowlight. A blue light from beyond our world touched the pink
that is Earth's at evening: and what was strange and a matter for
hushed voices, marvellous but yet of our earth, became at that
touch unearthly. All in a moment it was, and Rodriguez gasped to
see it. Even Morano's eyes grew round with the coming of wonder,
or with some dim feeling that an unnoticed moment had made all
things strange and new.
For some moments the spell of moonlight on sunlight hovered: the
air was brimming and quivering with it: magic touched earth. For
some moments, some thirty beats of a heron's wing, had the angels
sung to men, had their songs gone earthward into that rosy glow,
gliding past layers of faintly tinted cloud, like moths at dusk
towards a briar-rose; in those few moments men would have known
their language.
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