However, this is going too fast. The only way to appreciate _Angel Island_ is to be conscious of the art of it as you read. Beginning with the shipwreck, Mrs. Gillmore creates a series of brilliant pictures that culminate in the flying orgies of the bird-women.
... All this was intensified by the anarchy of sea and sky, by the incessant explosion of the waves, by the wind which seemed to sweep from end to end of a liquefying universe, by a downpour which threatened to beat their sodden bodies to pulp, by all the connotation of terror that lay in the darkness and in their unguarded condition on a barbarous, semi-tropical coast....
The storm, which had seemed to worry the whole universe in its grip, had died finally but it had died hard. On a quieted earth, the sea alone showed signs of revolution. The waves, monstrous, towering, swollen, were still marching on to the beach with a machine-like regularity that was swift and ponderous at the same time.... Beyond the wave-line, under a cover of foam, the jaded sea lay feebly palpitant like an old man asleep....
They had watched the sun come up over the trees at their back. And it was as if they had seen a sunrise for the first time in their lives. To them it was neither beautiful nor familiar; it was sinister and strange. A chill, that was not of the dawn but of death itself, lay over everything. The morning wind was the breath of the tomb, the smells that came to them from the island bore the taint of mortality, the very sun seemed icy. They suffered--the five survivors of the night's tragedy--with a scarifying sense of disillusion with Nature....
The sun was racing up a sky smooth and clear as gray glass. It dropped on the torn green sea a shimmer that was almost dazzling; but there was something incongruous about that--as though Nature had covered her victim with a spangled scarf. It brought out millions of sparkles in the white sand; and there seemed something calculating about that--as though she were bribing them with jewels to forget....
Dozens of waves flashed and crashed their way up the beach; but now they trailed an iridescent network of foam over the lilac-gray sand. The sun raced high; but now it poured a flood of light on the green-gray water. The air grew bright and brighter. The earth grew warm and warmer. Blue came into the sky, deepened--and the sea reflected it. Suddenly the world was one huge glittering bubble, half of which was the brilliant azure sky and half the burnished azure sea.