Clouds - a Portfolio

The Writing of the Sky

If the wind is the spirit of the skyp ocean, the clouds are its texture, They are embodied imagination, the sheet music of the heavens, the architecture of moving air. Theirs is easily the most uninhibited dominion of the Earth. Nothing in physical skape is too fantastic for them... titanic gesnice to the bidding of the qale...

The Cirrus... are the wing feathers of the wind... They have neither the thunderous voice of the cumulus nor the wet cargo of the nimbus, but silently flick their horse tails and their dainty plumes like a kind of elite fairy cavalry that no ordinary earthlings can hope to appoach... They are the silver eyelashes of the sun... sometimes its Silver scales become shells and take on a pearly iridescence in the twilight, holding the warm colors of the sunset long after the lower clouds have turned to gray...

suddenly beheld a glowing red and gold sunset... the direct sux in the west was blocked from view by cloud walls... but a hole had opened in the floor out of which the reflected solar glory... bounced up from nether clouds-a sort of twentieth-century Dante's Inferno!...

Thus from the frosty cobweb of the cirrus noon to the cumulus apricot sunset we have reviewed the shapes and colors of clouds of the modern Earth, clouds that in the dawn look like purple shoulders of the distant mountains floating above them; frilly feminine clouds like wads of tissue out of a celestial hatbox, scud clouds that skim above us, alto-cumulus shadows weaving across, cotton stratus sheets loosely featherstitched with sun, cirrus brushstrokes like chinese script upon the ceiling-full many a passage of suspense and meaning to those who read the writing of the sky....