“I looked up then, out the far window, and there, just within sight, the sun was going down across the river. It was dull red, no longer shining over the land, its ray brought home to roost, contained within its sphere. The sky was streaked with lavendar, a pulsing pale blue, purple and smudged pink and orange melding into one another all the way to the horizon.”

“There were no clouds, the sun was going down in a limpid, gold-washed sky. Just as the lower edge of the red disk rested on the high fields against the horizon, a great black figure suddenly appeared on the face of the sun. We sprang to our feet, straining our eyes toward it. In a moment we realized what it was. On some upland farm, a plough had been left standing in the field. The sun was sinking just behind it. Magnified across the distance by the horizontal light, it stood out against the sun, was exactly contained within the circle of the disk; the handles, the tongue, the share—black against the molten red. There it was, heroic in size, a picture writing on the sun.”

“...raised herself on one round elbow and looked out on a tiny river like a gleaming blue snake winding itself around a purple hill. Right below the house was a field white as snow with daisies, and the shadow of the huge maple tree that bent over the little house fell lacily across it. Far beyond it were the white crests of Four Winds Harbour and a long range of sun-washed dunes and red cliffs.”

“The park is high. And as out of a houseI step out of its glimmering half-lightinto openness and evening. Into the wind,the same wind that the clouds feel,the bright rivers and the turning millsthat stand slowly grinding at the sky's edge.Now I too am a thing held in its hand,the smallest thing under the sky. --Look:Is that one sky?: Blissfully lucid blue,into which ever purer clouds throng,and under it all white in endless changes,and over it that huge, thin-spun gray,pulsing warmly as on red underpaint,and over everything this silent radianceof a setting sun. Miraculous structure,moved within itself and upheld by itself,shaping figures, giant wings, faultsand high mountain ridges before the first starand suddenly, there: a gate into suchdistances as perhaps only birds know...”

“Over the plains of Ethiopia the sun rose as I had not seen it in seven years. A big, cool, empty sky flushed a little above a rim of dark mountains. The landscape 20,000 feet below gathered itself from the dark and showed a pale gleam of grass, a sheen of water. The red deepened and pulsed, radiating streaks of fire. There hung the sun, like a luminous spider's egg, or a white pearl, just below the rim of the mountains. Suddenly it swelled, turned red, roared over the horizon and drove up the sky like a train engine. I knew how far below in the swelling heat the birds were an orchestra in the trees about the villages of mud huts; how the long grass was straightening while dangling locks of dewdrops dwindled and dried; how the people were moving out into the fields about the business of herding and hoeing.”

“They rode on and the sun in the east flushed pale streaks of light and then a deeper run of color like blood seeping up in sudden reaches flaring planewise and where the earth drained up into the sky at the edge of creation the top of the sun rose out of nothing like the head of a great red phallus until it cleared the unseen rim and sat squat and pulsing and malevolent behind them.”