IN CLOUDLAND'S REALM.

Otago Witness, Issue 2685, 30 August 1905, Page 80

IN CLOUDLAND'S REALM.

By a Banker.

How varied is the aspect of the firmament above vs — ever changing, ever diversified, -u>d £iihject to sudden mutations and transformations! Now the entire canopied dome of the heavens is an intensely deep brilliant azure, vying with the sapphire- itisclf in the .splendour of its hue; xuiflccked by cloud save a few scattered wisps and tufts of feathery ice spangles — the cirrus or curl-cloud — suspended far up in the atmosphere in the regions of perpetual frost. Or r.ow irregular masses of pure white vapour, dazzling in their lustrous splendency, are rapidly fleeting across the sky, soon, as they gather in volume, changing from snowy white to a murky, threatening blackness, blotting out from view every ■\estige of that glorious ceiulean ether, an.l shrouding the laadscace m gloom. But tlivy

pass away on to the distant horizon, where they lie banked up in a long black line, tha far-off niutterings of rolling thunder betokening that they are discharging the vial 3of their wrath elsewhere.

And then appear upon the scene rapidiyjnoving clouds, assumirg all manner of grotesque and fantastic shapes. Here a gigantic misshapen primeval animal, a. very nxonster of deformity, pursuing a horde of distorted mongrels, half dragon, half sea-serpent; hera a regiment of prancing centaurs in regular array; or here a number of rounded cloudlets in the semblance of a flock at rest. But these too pass away, to be succeeded by long, straight lines of stratus cloud, hanging suspended low down near the earth, some evea resting upon its surface, veiling the valley beneath a sharply-d«fined mantle of cold white mist.

But of all the multiform diversities in which cloudland so abounds, perhaps tha most beautiful, though sometimes almost teirible, of them all is the lurid bank of tnwnder cloud sometimes seen on the horizon at sninset The sky immediately above tha cloud-bank is a flaming orange, shading from a livid, glowing violet into a coppery umber, which, as the j-am sinks deeper and deeper, changes into a sombroiis, livid gloom. The cloud itself is a deep purple, but its irregular and ofttime3 serrated edges are on fire in a burring fringe of flashing gold, its lustrous resplendence enhanced and intensified by the dusky gloom of the cloud itself. And then, as the last rays or the disappearing 1 luminary have died out, all these varied huc3 ■>-anish away, and all is blackness and clsrtlißSS.

And so wilh life ; for the blackest and dafkeet cf clouds has most siu-ely and most certainly a golden or a silver lining, which soon must permeate the whole and dissipate the darkness if the Sun of Righteousness illumine the soul, and by the power of Hia Spirit reveal th.o great fact that He. iJia Redeemer, has opened the gates of Paradise to all who plead with their Heavenly Fathar His merits and mediation. But if this i 3 postponed to a more convenient time, which probably will rever come, the recording angel may utter that terrible doom — "The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and they are not saved."