In a moment it is noticeable that the south is becoming rosier.  The sea is now alight from the increase of sunset hues.  In the shadow the lines of the sea are a sequence of wavings like the smoke of the snow blown over the steppes.  In the hurrying clouds a great space clears, and along the south-west runs a great rosy fleece of sunset.  It is rapidly darkening.  The sea in the western corner is crimson, but all the vast south is silver and sombre.  The horizon is like that seen from a balloon—­pushed out to its furthermost, and there, where clouds and sky mingle, one sees fantastically as it were the sides of giant, shadowy fish.

The motor-coach, with its passengers from Sebastopol to Yalta, comes rushing and grumbling up behind me and stops five minutes, this being its half-way point.  The passengers adjourn into the inn to drink vodka:  “Remember, gentlemen, five minutes only,” says the chauffeur.  “God help any one who gets left behind at Baidari....”  Four minutes later there is a stamping of fat men in heavy overcoats round the brightly varnished ’bus.  “Are we going?” says a little man to the refreshed but purple-faced chauffeur.  “Yes!” “That’s good.  I’ve had enough of this.”  The guard winds his horn, and after a preliminary squirm of the plump tyres on the soft road, the vehicle and its company goes tumbling down the road as if it were descending into a pit.

And the sunset!  It develops with every instant.  The lines on the sea seem to move more quickly, and the spaces between them to be larger.  The west is full of storm.  A closing cloud comes up out of the west:  the western sea is utterly hopeless, the moving south inexorable.  There is terror in the west.

Evening is more below me than above me.  Night is coming to me over the dark woods.  The foam on the rocks below is like a milk-white robe.  As I walk the first miles downhill I begin to hear the sound of the waves.  The sea is beginning to roar, and the wind rushing up to me tells me that the lines of the sea are its stormy waves ridden forward to the shore by a gale.

I stood on the platform where the many-domed temple was built, and watched the gathering night.  Unnumbered trees lay beneath me, but it was so dusk I hardly knew them to be trees.  The gigantic black cliff that shuts off the west stood blank into the heaven like a great door:  to the east lay the ghostly fading coast-line of Aloopka.  Among the black clouds overhead danced out happy fires, and, answering their brightness, windows lighted up in cottages far below, and lanterns gleamed on a little steamer just puffing over the horizon.

There came the pure December evening with frost and Christmas bells, and happy hearths somewhere in the background.  The one star in the sky was a beckoning one:  my heart yearned.

I dipped down upon the road, and in a few minutes was looking at the temple from below, seeing it entirely silhouetted against the sky.  It was now indeed held up in a giant’s palm and looked at.