Opening scene from "Benito Cereno" (1855)

[Melville, Herman. "Benito Cereno." Great Short Works of Herman Melville. HarperCollins, 1969.]

"The morning was one particular to that coast. Everthing was mute and calm; everything gray. The sea, though undulated into long roods of swells, seemed fixed, and was sleeked at the surface like waved lead that has cooled and set in the smelter's mold. The sky seemed a gray surtout. Flights of troubled gray fowl, kith and kin with flights of troubled gray vapors among which they were mixed, skimmed low and fitfully over the waters, as swallows over meadows before storms. Shadows present, foreshadowing deeper shadows to come." (239)