The Ship of Coral

n a sky of dazzling gold; momently the gold of the sunset took possession of the sky, spreading up, up, till the very zenith was reached, and down, down, till the gilding reached the easte

at wonderful sunset the palm tops burned like fingers of flame, and as music light

h was in a moment transformed to a dream of colour, the brains of frost-white coral became golden lamps; starfi

ite as a jewel, then just as she had bloomed she faded out, her colour and beauty16 passing with the fading light, and as night swept over the sea

darkness that had displaced the world of gold; he had seen many things, but nothing that had ever struck his imagination so vividly as the sig

the ruin of man's work was like l

t nothin

turning towards the s

ith the idea of the snow; when a boy in Brittany he had seen things heaped with snow and bulked out in size, carts, barrels, and so forth, just as the old ship was heaped and bulked out with coral; but the simile was lost on Gaspard; you do not get snow at Montpellier to any ex

u get flowers under the sea?" The stupidity

ng of flowers under the sea; I was tal

fire of dry brushwood; when it was burning he heaped on some wreck-wood; the ship of coral, th

he work of the day was over. They had rigged up a rough sort of tent with t

und. Above, the sky solid with stars, voiceless, windless, seemed a thing more alive and active than the sea. From the slight elevation where they sat a ghostly white streak on the starli

lence and nodding in the direction of the reef; "seems a pity tha

range I was thinking of that hooke

"Ye

s stuff worth looking for a'boa

lau

gh it what would you find? dead men's bones. It's like your flowers under the sea." He tapped the dottle out of his pipe, ro

he had run away to sea. Yves, the son of long generations of sailors, had gone to sea as a duckling goes to the pond. Gaspard had been taken there by his imagination. He knew himself superior to th

s already snoring, and he slept and dreamt of the docks