The Sea Fogs E-Book

Robert Louis Stevenson

• Herausgeber: Robert Louis Stevenson
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

"The sea fogs" is an account of a trip to Napa Valley (California), first published by Stevenson in short story form in 1879. During this trip the writer's health worsens: influenced by disease, Stevenson began writing of poisonous mists from the sea that hover over the valley below. Then, gradually, the idea takes shape and boundless cloud turns hills and Islands in a giant ship. A few pages, but intense and visionary, issued from the mind of one of the most important writers of all time.

Leseprobe

The Sea Fogs

by

Robert Louis Stevenson

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A sheeted spectre white and tall,

The cold mist climbs the castle wall

And lays its hand upon thy cheek.

— Longfellow.

The Sea Fogs

A change in the colour of the light usually called me in the morning. By a certain hour, the long, vertical chinks in our western gable, where the boards had shrunk and separated, flashed suddenly into my eyes as stripes of dazzling blue, at once so dark and splendid that I used to marvel how the qualities could be combined. At an earlier hour, the heavens in that quarter were still quietly coloured, but the shoulder of the mountain which shuts in the canyon already glowed with sunlight in a wonderful compound of gold and rose and green; and this too would kindle, although more mildly and with rainbow tints, the fissures of our crazy gable. If I were sleeping heavily, it was the bold blue that struck me awake; if more lightly, then I would come to myself in that earlier and fairier light.

One Sunday morning, about five, the first brightness called me. I rose and turned to the east, not for my devotions, but for air. The night had been very still. The little private gale that blew every evening in our canyon, for ten minutes or perhaps a quarter of an hour, had swiftly blown itself out; in the hours that followed, not a sigh of wind had shaken the treetops; and our barrack, for all its breaches, was less fresh that morning than of wont. But I had no sooner reached the window than I forgot all else in the sight that met my eyes, and I made but two bounds into my clothes, and down the crazy plank to the platform.