Pierre Loti, or I should say Julien Viaud ( his real name) 1850-1923, was a French descriptive writer who was also esteemed naval officer. He travelled the world, writing about everything he experienced. His writings contained some of the best descriptive narratives of the 19th century. His prose contains so much personal feeling and emotion that it called him to be called the most "Perfect French writer " of the times.
With the days getting shorter and the sea greyer, I found his "Morning at Sea" amazed me over and over and over......
"The morning light, the real light, had finally come, and as in Genesis, it was divided from the darkness, which seemed to be heaped up over the horizon.Now that one could see so clearly one could easily tell that night had been left far behind, and that the former radiance had been as strange and vague as the light of a dream...
Here and there in the thick and overhanging sky there were rents like windows in a dome, through which great shafts of golden, rosy light shot down.
The lower clouds lay in a band of deep shadow all about the horizon,infolding the ocean distances in dim obscurity, producing the illusion of enclosed space; they were like curtains drawn over the infinite, like veils let down to conceal mysteries too gigantic for the imagination of men......
This morning, around the little craft.......
the changing world had taken on the look of a vast cloister, a santuary, where the rays of light which came through the rifts in the temple's dome fell in long...............
reflected rays upon the motionless water...................
...as on a pavement of marble......
....And then in the growing light........
...another vision appeared from afar....................
...a towering promontory of gloomy Iceland cut out like a rosy cameo........
..............against the dull grey sky." ( Pierrre Loti, 19tn century French writer)
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