Azure

“ On both sides, islands, rocks, boldly-cut promontories stand in sharp relief in the pale azure; the scene changes every quarter of an hour. But on rounding every point the infinite ocean reappears, mingling its almost flat line with the curve of the white sky. ”

“ Out towards the open sea, the watery void is broken up and relieved by lovely mountainous islands, round whose wooded summits the quick changing clouds chase each other in bewildering rapidity; and ever and anon white sails flash across the ken of vision, or trailing lines of black smoke from some swift steamer mar for a moment the clear brilliancy of the azure sky. ”

“ Nothing, in fact, can be more beautiful than the intermingling of these bright lines with the darkness of the reversed cypresses seen against the deep azure of the distant hills in the crystalline waters of the lake, of which some one aptly says, "Deep within its azure rest, white villages sleep silently;" ”

“ And the sun rose and rose, bathing the blue sea and the rich verdure and the glaring white architecture in the very fluid of essential life. The whole azure coast basked in it like an immense cat, commencing the day with a voluptuous savouring of the fact that it was alive. The sun is the treacherous and tyrannical god of the South, and when he withdraws himself, arbitrary and cruel, the land and the people shiver and prepare to die. ”

“ The islands are very quiet. One sees them lying about, clothed in their dark garments of leaves, in a great hush of silver and azure, where the sea without murmurs meets the sky in a ring of magic stillness. ”

“ When Britain first at Heaven's command,
⁠Arose from out the azure main,
Arose, arose, arose from out the azure main
⁠This was the charter, the charter of the land,
And guardian angels sang this strain,
⁠Rule Britannia! ”

“ High in the azure heavens, ye ancient mountains,
Do ye uplift your old ancestral snows,
Gathering amid the clouds those icy fountains,
Whence many a sunny stream through India flows. ”

“ Ghost of Robinson Crusoe, what else can a man want? Why, even these islands, the Azores, so close to home, how the prospect of seeing them fills us with eagerness! What will the hills be like, and the people, and the fruit, and the wine, and birds, and flowers, and fish! We long to see them with the utmost impatience now that only a narrow strip of rough blue sea lies between us and them, to-night we may fetch its lights—to-morrow we will see the land in full sun for a certainty. ”

“ I want you to march this army through an underground tunnel, which I am going to bore, to the Emerald City of Oz. When you get there I want you to conquer the Oz people, destroy them and their city, and bring all their gold and silver and precious stones back to my cavern. ”

“ This is the peninsula of Azuera, a wild chaos of sharp rocks and stony levels cut about by vertical ravines. It lies far out to sea like a rough head of stone stretched from a green-clad coast at the end of a slender neck of sand covered with thickets of thorny scrub. Utterly waterless, for the rainfall runs off at once on all sides into the sea, it has not soil enough—it is said—to grow a single blade of grass, as if it were blighted by a curse. ”

“ This barren and inhospitable volcanic island has presented a singularly unpromising field of labour to the naval detachment which for many years has been maintained there. Solid and capacious stores, extensive ranges of buildings, miles of roads, the tanks, the hospitals on the seashore and on the mountain, the farm on the peak—a green oasis crowning a heap of cinders—attest the zeal of a succession of officers and men. ”

“ Every incredible thing is possible in this miracle country, where purple mountain peaks quiver in the shimmering golden light, where ruins of remote ages stand side by side with the primitive mechanism of pioneer living, where snow-capped mountain peaks are watched from valleys that have the temperature and the productions of the tropics. Arizona contains unknown and undreamed-of resources of gold, copper, and silver. The state has the richest possibilities in mineral wealth; there are thousands of square miles of range lands ”

“ In her bosom are hidden inexhaustible stores of iron, copper, and coal. Her Highland hills are covered with forests of oak and larch, growing while men sleep. Her borders are crowded with workshops, and her skies are dark with the smoke of their chimneys, and the air rings with the sound of their hammers. Her docks are filled with ships, and her watchful guardians are on every sea. Her eyes are open to profit by every invention. And her strong colonies, overlooking all waters, give new vigor and a better distribution to her naval resources. ”

“ When the defeated sea was smooth they conquered the leak and rigged sails against the twisted funnels and ventilators of the Lauritan, and the passengers above danced, and sang, and played shovel-board while we drifted and sailed far away to the blue Azores—a travesty of joy and heedlessness above and a fight for maimed life below. ”

“ The entire journey through Arizona offers one of the most unique experiences of a lifetime. Is this "The Country God Forgot"? The vast stretch of the plains offer effects as infinite as the sea. The vista includes only land and sky. The cloud forms and the atmospheric effects are singularly beautiful. As one flies on into Arizona this wonderful color effect in the air becomes more vivid. ”

“ Michael as it is called in English, was mapped, two mountain peaks were marked where later only one could be discovered. Thus it was that the Azores gained their reputation. Islands full of volcanoes amid seas of spouting geysers could be nothing else but enchanted. And islands and mountain peaks which suddenly vanished away from one's sight! Surely the Azores must be the true land of magic. ”

“ A Message Comes from the Diamond Ship.
I shall carry you next to a scene in the Southern Atlantic, to a day in the month following my escape from the Azores. The morning is a brilliant morning of torrid heat and splendid sunshine. The sea about us is a sea gleaming as a sheeted mirror of the purest silver; a vast, still, silent sea, with a cloudless horizon and a breath as of Southern springtime. ”

“ Before we had passed the Azores we came in for a terrific gale, which our overladen vessel was in no condition to meet; she speedily sprang a leak, so serious that in a very short time four of the eight furnaces were extinguished and the firemen were toiling at the rest up to their knees in water. For hours we looked for her to founder at any moment, as the gray breakers came rolling upon us, but somehow we managed to keep her afloat, and in due course were ploughing through the sunny waters of New Providence, and came to rest in the pretty harbour of Nassau. ”

“ At present Arizona is the happy hunting-ground of the unfortunate red man. There is, I am assured, no disposition on the part of the whites to intrude upon the reservations of the various tribes. I did not hear of any one who 14 had come in from the East to settle with the view of making his fortune by farming; but miners have flooded the cañons, and climbed the mountain-tops; and now they have settled down into a steady way of life without any big "booms," as the Americans say, but with prospects of pretty certain returns for their labour. ”

“ THE POOR MAN'S WELL.
Among the Azores, is situated the beautiful Island of Fayal, with its orange-groves and profusion of flowers. But, notwithstanding the fruit and flowers, there is one thing which Americans who live there miss sadly, and that is fresh, cool water. There are no lakes or ponds, such as we have here; and so the people have to use rain-water, which they save in large tanks or cisterns. ”

“ Now it is generally known in the Azores that if one does not want to keep up a quarrel it is well to pretend that his mouth is full of water. This is the reason why the people of the islands are so peaceful and happy. ”

“ The deep-sea soundings show that the vast bulk of land, of which the Azores are the outcroppings, are so connected yet with such ridges, although their crests are below the sea-level; and we know of no other island-mass of the Atlantic that is so united with the continents on both sides of it. ”

“ Civilisation, however, is gradually asserting her claim to those fertile districts. Arizona is rich in mineral products—nearly all the mountains in the south and centre yielding gold, silver, copper, and lead. ”

“ Back in Colorado, where I used to live before I went to Oz. Brother was a miner, and dug gold out of a mine. One day he went into his mine and never came out. They searched for him, but he was not there. ”

“ Below the floating city, digging into the continental shelf, was the underwater settlement—oil wells to supplement the industrial synthesizing process, mining, exploration in tanks to find new resources, a slow growth outward as men learned how to go deeper into cold and darkness and pressure. ”

“ Speaking in round numbers, we may say that four-fifths of all the species now wild in the Azores are wild also in Europe, from which many of them have been doubtless carried to the Azores by the early settlers. Of the remaining one-fifth, nearly the whole number are peculiar to the Azores, or to the Archipelago of the Atlantic Islands, which includes also Madeira and the Canaries. Some have emigrated to the Azores from the continents of Africa and America. ”

“ I want the reader to understand that even though the process of evolution has taken a life-time, I cannot cease wondering at the marvelous development of the Territory and, later, State of Arizona. When I glance back over the vista of years and see the old, and then open my eyes to survey the new, it is almost as though a Verne or a Haggard sketch had come to life. ”

“ At length, toward two o’clock in the morning—by which time the Indiaman had become the mere shell of a ship, a blazing furnace from stem to stern,—a light breeze sprang up from the north-north-east, almost dead in our teeth for the voyage to the Azores ”

“ And to-day the big hearted and stalwart miner goes to fever-laden Africa and ice-bound Alaska, when there are whole mountains of the best mineral bearing land in the world in his own country, but which our present laws forbid him to touch. ”

“ Agriculture is the great industry of the Azorians, whose implements are still of a very primitive type, the harrows tipped with fragments of lava dating, in fact, from the stone age. But so fertile is the land, that even so it yields twenty- fold the corn committed to the earth. Unlike other great feudatories, the proprietors are seldom absentees, residing constantly on their estates, and TOPOGRAPHY OE THE AZORES. 33 industriously reclaiming every inch of arable land. Wheat, which degenerates in San-Miguel, thrives well in Santa-Maria. ”

“ The company is a band of hardy, weather-beaten men, chiefly Portuguese, of the Azores, who have a lookout station on the hill by the ruined fort, and a barracks lower down. They pursue their avocation from the shore in boats, with plenty of adventure and no small profit. ”

“ Their busy labourers built gigantic water-works, digged endless canals, and carried distant waters through the sands of the desert; their mighty, energetic spirit built large and secure harbours, dried the marshy lakes, covered the sea with vessels, the land with living beings, and spread a creation of life and movement along the earth. Their commerce was broad as the known world. ”

“ As a rule, they follow the streams that seem to lead almost everywhere among the ranges, as if purposely chiseled out from the beginning, as future pathways of civilization. Our miners, taking the hint, carry their roads over heights, and through depths, and among peaks, that would appal most eastern engineers, and thus enable us to conquer nature in her mightiest strongholds. ”

“ There are Arizona miners and Australian sheep-raisers; country poets, country parsons, gamblers, Jesuits, European nihilists, men in the employ of foreign secret-service bureaus—all sorts of men, except the bovine male, with lethargic mind and lack-lustre eye. ”

“ Navigators, sent out by him from time to time, discovered the Madeira Islands; sailed along the western coast of Africa a considerable distance; ascertained the presence of gold-dust among the savages on the Gulf of Guinea; discovered the Azores, besides numerous other islands and lands; crossed the equator, and approached to within about eighteen hundred miles of the south-most cape of Africa. ”

“ On the contrary, the last opinion says expressly: 'The obligations of the United States to this grantee will be performed by the performance of the executive acts which are devolved by the grant on the local authority.'IV. But how is the matter as an original question?
1. As to the southern boundary. On this side stands the main Sierra,-the Sierra Azul,-which lifts up its head nearly 4000 feet toward the sky. Of course, this mountain forms the great feature of the landscape. It is visible in every direction for nearly fifty miles. ”

“ Infant at Cape St. Vincent, "there where both the seas meet in combat, that is to say, the great Ocean sea with the Mediterranean sea", a place designed by the Prince to be a great mercantile centre, and a safe harbour for ships from East and West.
In Chapter VI, Azurara returns to his laudations of the Infant, whom he apostrophises thus: "I know that the seas and lands are full of your praises, for that you, by numberless voyages, have joined the East to the West, in order that the peoples might learn to exchange their riches" ”

“ Its mountains abound in useful and precious produce. Coal is found there; gold is collected from its rivers; silver and iron are yielded by its hills; we hear too of its mines of turquoise, and of its cliffs of lapis lazuli, [30] and its mines of rubies, which to this day are the object of the traveller's curiosity. [31] I might extend my remarks to the country south of the Oxus and of its mountain range, the modern Affghanistan. ”

“ Genesmere knew, the foreman supposed, that this well was the last for more than a hundred miles? Funny to call a thing like that Santa Cruz a river! Well, it was an Arizona river; all right enough, no doubt, somewhere a thousand feet or so underground. Pity you weren't a prairie-dog that eats sand when he gets a thirst on him. Got any tobacco? Good-by.
Think of any valleys that you know between high mountains. Such was southern Arizona once—before we came. Then fill up your valleys with sand until the mountains show no feet or shoulders, but become as men buried to the neck. ”