#just----them

It was sunset when, the round completed, we turned back toward the camp. But I remember that as though by common consent, with no word spoken between us, we wheeled the horses on a low billow of rising land, and looked westward once more, and having looked, could neither of us look away. I have seen wild sunsets in my time, but seldom, surely never, a sky quite like that one. It was as though beyond the dark, gold-fringed cloud bars of the west, the world itself was burning, and the torn-off rags of the burning, spreading into great wings as they went, were drifting all across the sky so that even when one looked upward to the zenith, still the sky was full of the rush of vast wings of flame. Far off toward the Island of Apples, the winding waters of the reed country caught fire from the burning west, and earth and sky alike blazed into an oriflamme. It was a sunset full of the sound of trumpets and the flying of banners, a sunset that made one feel naked under the eye of God. . . . "If tomorrow we go down into the Dark," Cei said at last, with awe in his deep grumble of a voice as the radiance began to fade, "at least we have seen the sunset."