Edison Marshall

“ VIII Before ever that long night was done, clouds had overswept the sky and a cold rain was beating upon the sea. It swept against the ports of the little craft and brought troubled dreams to Lenore and Mrs. Hardenworth. Bess, who knew life better than these two, to whom the whole journey had been a joyous adventure, did not wholly escape a feeling of uneasiness and dismay. At this latitude and season the weather was little to be trusted.
The drizzle changed to snow that lay white on the deck and hissed softly in the water. As yet, how ever, it was nothing to fear. ”

“ Largely treeless, wind-swept, mostly unpeopled except for a few furtive creatures of the wild, they seemed no part of the world that Ned and Lenore had previously known. They were all so gray, so bleak, swept with an unearthly sadness, silent except for the weary beat of waves upon their craggy shores.
Mostly the islands were mere snow-swept mountains protruding above the waters, at a distance seemingly as gray as the rest of the toneless landscape. Only the less mountainous of the islands had human occupants, and these were in small, far-scattered Indian villages. ”

“ The sun kissed the sea no more: under the sifting snow it stretched infinitely bleak and forbidding. Gray were the clouds in the sky that had been the purest, most serene blue. And now even the islands had lost their varied tints.
Evergreen forests almost always look blue at a distance,—bluish-green when the sun is bright, bluish-black under clouds. But these voyagers saw, with a dim, haunting dread, that the forests mostly had been left far behind them. The islands they passed now were no longer heavily wooded ”