Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from A Bird of Passage
The summit of the island commands a wide View: to the north lies the mainland With its sharply indented shores, and a wide sickle-shaped estuary, sweeping far away into the interior, where its wooded curves are lost among the hills; the southern side of Ross looks sheer out upon the boundless ocean, and receives the full force of many a terrible tropical hurricane, that has travelled unspent from the Equator.
There was not a ripple on that vast blue surface, one certain August evening, a few years ago - save where it fretted gently in and out, between the jagged black rocks that surrounded the island; the sea was like a mirror, and threw back an accurate re?ection of boats, and hills, and wooded shores; distant, seldom -seen islands, now loomed in the horizon with vague, misty outlines; a delicate, soft, south wind barely touched the leaves of the big trees, among whose branches the busy green parrots had been chattering, and the gorgeous peacocks, screech ing and swinging, all through the long, hot, sleepy afternoon.
Surely the setting sun was making a more lingering and, as it were, regretful adieu to these beautiful remote islands than to other parts of the world No pen could describe, no brush convey, any idea of the vivid crimson, western -clouds, and the ?ood of blinding golden light, that bathed the hills, the far-away islets, the tangled mangroves, and the glassy sea.
To the cool dispassionate northern eye, which may have first opened on a leaden sky, snow-capped hills, pine woods, -and ploughed lands, there was a general impression of wildly gaudy, south sea scenery, of savage silence, and lawless solitude.
S'oon that scarlet ball will have plunged below the horizon, a short-lived grey twilight have spread her veil over land and sea, the parrots' noisy pink bills will be tucked under their wings, and the turbulent peacocks have gone to roost.
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