Seven Shasta Scenes: IV

Night. Otherwise the same scene. Our miner sits in his tent door, meditating on the novel beauty of the scene before, below him. A north breeze has rolled the smoky sea silently away and left no sign. Beneath the tent outspreads a vast abyss, dark, silent, “the night’s Plutonian shore.” Our miner’s fancy fills it with golden phantoms. Only the stars, “night’s tall tapers,” lighten the gloom. But far away east, over ranges of lesser mountains, dim shapes couched in the darkness, far away, miles real as well as seeming, familiar shadowy shape of vast, uncertain size appears to shut from sight vision of some awful conflagration. Look! It grows, it brightens, till on the charmed eyes bursts a sudden, intense spark, then a full flame in Ieka’s side—‘tis the moon at its roundest! And now Ieka’s snows glow in its ray like molten silver, the dark abyss before, beneath the tent lightens, the phantoms flee, while over all, sublime, glorious, supreme, rises Shasta’s argent image.