It shaded westward into heliotrope and this into a purple so royal, so matchless and rare that Carley understood why the purple of the heavens could never be reproduced in paint.

Here the cloud mass thinned and paled, and a tint of rose began to flush the billowy, flowery, creamy white.

Then came the surpassing splendor of this cloud pageant--a vast canopy of shell pink, a sun-fired surface like an opal sea, rippled and webbed, with the exquisite texture of an Oriental fabric, pure, delicate, lovely--as no work of human hands could be.

It mirrored all the warm, pearly tints of the inside whorl of the tropic nautilus.

And it ended abruptly, a rounded depth of bank, on a broad stream of clear sky, intensely blue, transparently blue, as if through the lambent depths shone the infinite firmament.