Excerpt from The Image in the Sand The glory of the evening hour grew more and more vivid in ever-increasing crescendo of colour, even as a fugue played by some master-organist rises from climax to climax as bank after bank of out-drawn stops and keyboard coupled to keyboard makes the air thick with tumultuous melody. Then the supreme moment arrived, as the sun touched and began to sink behind the Libyan hills. Then in a second all was changed: rose and gold, blue and green, were sucked from land and sky, as if sinking sponge-like into the earth, and gray, the echo only of colour, but gray of all shades and hues, from the luminousness of sunlit mist to the dark brood ing gray of sea beneath thunder-cloud, took its place. A little cool wind awoke, and blew from the full-flowering ave nue of mimosas in the hotel garden, filling the air with thick ineflable fragrance; the song of birds in the bushes, the chattering of sparrows, the flute of the hoopoe, ceased; and the sudden night of the South fell in layer after rapid layer over the sky. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.