SUNRISE ON TRINIDAD

Manawatu Times, Volume LIV, Issue 6850, 4 March 1929, Page 11

SUNRISE ON TRINIDAD

Under a heaven of exquisitely teador blue, the whole Binooth sea has a perfect luminous dove-colour, the horizon being filled to a great height with greenish-golden haze, a mist of unspeakably sweet tint, a hue that imitated in any aquarelle, would be cried out against as an impossibility. As yet the hills are nearly all grey, the forests also enwrapping them are grey and ghostly, for the Bun has just risen above them, and vapours hang like a vei between. Then, over the glassy level of the flood, bands of purple and violet and pale blue and fluid gold begin to shoot and quiver and broaden; these are the currents of the morning, catching varying colour with the deepening of the day and the lifting of the tide.

Then, as the sun rises higher, green masses begin to glimmer among the greys; the outlines of the forest summits commence to define themselves through the vapoury light, to left and right of the great glow. Only the city still remains invisible; it lies exactly between us and the downpour of solar splendour, and the mists there have caught such radiance that the place seems hidden by a fog of fire. Gradually the gold-green of the horizon changes to a pure yellow; the sills take soft, rich, sensuous colours. One of the more remote has turned a marvellous tone —a seemingly diaphanous aureate colour, the very ghost of gold. But at last all of them sharpen bluoly, show bright folds and ribbings of green through their haze. The valleys remain awhile clouded, as if filled with something like blue smoke; but the projecting masses of cliff and slope swiftly change their misty green to a warmer hue. All these tints and colours. have a spectral charm, a preternatural loveliness; everything seems subdued, softened, semi-vapourised, the only very sharply defined silhouettes being' those of the little becalmed ships sprinkling the western water, all spreading coloured wings to catch tho morning breeze. The more the sun ascends, the more rapid the development of the landscape out of tho vapoury blue; the hills all become grcen-fuced, reveal the details of the frondage. Tho wind fills the white sails—white, red, yellow, ripples the water and turns it green. Little fish begin to leap; they spring and fall in glittoring showers like opalescent blown spray. And at last through the fading vapour, dew-glitter-ing, red-tiled roofs to veal themselves.: the city is unveiled—a city- full of I colour, somewhat - quaint, •. somewhat Spanish-looking—a little like St. Piero, a little like New Orleans in the old quarter; everywhere fine tall palms.— Lafcadio Hearn, in “A Midsummer Trip to tho Tropics.”