midnight
Bastioned upon the ocean cloud-tier was piled upon cloud-tier , spacious and lofty , until we gazed upon a Grand Canyon a myriad times vaster and more celestial than that of the Colorado . The clouds took on the same stratified , serrated , rose-rock formation , and all the hollows were filled with the opal blues and purple hazes of the Painted Lands . The Sailing Directions say that these remarkable sunsets are due to the dust being driven high into the air by the winds that blow across the pampas of the Argentine . And our sunset to-night -- I am writing this at midnight , as I sit propped in my blankets , wedged by pillows , while the _ Elsinore _ wallows damnably in a dead calm and a huge swell rolling up from the Cape Horn region , where , it does seem , gales perpetually blow . But our sunset . Turner might have perpetrated it . The west was as if a painter had stood off and slapped brushfuls of gray at a green canvas .