We left the Vinegar Works this evening under the most
extraordinary skies. The Professor, who has had to bone up on the science of
all this of late, said knowledgeably that it was to do with dust particles. The
effect was somewhere between Walt Disney and an eighteenth-century aquatint of
the eruption of Vesuvius, a band of clear eau-de-nil on the horizon, three
quarters of the sky filled with rolls of blazing pinkish-orange clouds, and
clear bright blue above. It changed, naturally, in the hour and a half it took
us to get home, but there was another fine moment when the jagged black saw of
Bennachie was silhouetted against an incandescent orange sky, with some puffs
and drifts of opaque black cloud which made it look like a live volcano. Not
that one wants a live volcano, exactly, but it was all very much what most eighteenth
century aesthetes seem to have meant about the Sublime, including being magnificent
without being personally inconvenient.
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