Angels' Shoes by Marjorie Pickthall — Read

The Horado, huge, torpid vein of the back-country, after taking tribute / of a thousand miles of jungle was suddenly released into the ocean, / whose clear and fertile depths it stained with the earth's rot and / detritus. Where these two encountered there was war, of meeting and / retreating waters; which only ceased when the slow pressure of the / turning tide exactly balanced the slow outpouring of the vast stream. / Then, for a little while, there was peace. In the midst of such a peace / lay the barquentine, _Dorotea Dixon_, waiting for high-water on the bar.

She, the soiled little trader, was briefly an illusion, a dream, built / of some substance of pearl-petal and rose-gold too lovely for a name. / Grier said the wet deck looked so fragile, so irridescent, that he / tapped it with his heel as he stood, for the assurance that he stood on / something more solid than a very bubble of the foam. The crew were / silent; for the most part gazing overside at the streaks of mud-brown / coiling in the sapphire; for the scornful sea never entirely mingled / with the current of the river. It was all glitteringly, insubstantially, / clear and vivid and still you'd have thought, said Grier, that a great / glass globe had been clapped down over everything. Islets of grass, / logs, nameless jungle-drift the dark river brought down and left about / them in that strange belt of no-man's-water between the flood and the / flood. In the very fulness of dawn it brought the dugout.