The Decay of the Angel - Yukio Mishima

and then blue distance once more. Three ideas will
sometimes join in our hearts.
The black hull of a small cargo ship, its funnel mark
a mountain over three horizontal lines, gave, in the
heaping up of its mass, a sense of grandeur and
sudden growth.
At two in the afternoon the sun withdrew into a thin
cocoon of clouds, a whitely shining worm.
The horizon was a blue-black hoop of steel
perfectly fitting the sea.
For an instant, at a single spot in the offing, a white
wave sprang up like a white wing and fell back again.
And what would that mean? It had to be some grand
signal, or perhaps a grand whim.
The tide came slowly in, the waves were rising, the
land lay before the most powerful of assaults. The sun
was behind clouds and the green of the sea took on a
somehow angry darkness. A long white line stretched
across it from east to west in a sort of gigantic
inverted triangle. It seemed to twist itself loose from
the flat surface and, near at hand, toward the apex,
fan-like lines lost themselves blackly in a black-green
sea.
The sun came out again. Again the sea gave
smooth lodging to the white light, and, at the ordering
of a southwest wind, numberless shadows like the