Between the darkness of earth and heaven she was burning fiercely upon a disc of purple sea shot by the blood-red play of gleams; upon a disc of water glittering and sinister.
A high, clear flame, an immense and lonely flame ascended from the ocean, and from its summit the black smoke poured continuously at the sky.
She burned furiously; mournful and imposing like a funeral pile kindled in the night, surrounded by the sea, watched over by the stars.
A magnificent death had come like a grace, like a gift, like a reward to that old ship at the end of her laborious days. The surrender of her weary ghost to the keeping stars and sea was stirring like the sight of a glorious triumph.
The masts fell just before daybreak, and for a moment there was a burst and turmoil of sparks that seemed to fill with flying fire the night patient and watchful, the vast night lying silent upon the sea. At daylight she was only a charred shell, floating still under a cloud of smoke and bearing a glowing mass of coal within.
Excerpt from
Youth by Joseph Conrad
Photos taken this month at Nuit Marine -
Locquirec Brittany .... where I live ....
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