THE WAVES
The sun bad not yet risen. The sea was indistingnishable from
the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had
wrinkles in it. Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay
on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the grey cloth
became barred witn thick strokes moving, one after another, beneath
the surface, following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually.
As they neared the shore each bar rose, heaped itself, broke and
swept a thin veil of white water across the sand. The wave paused,
and then drew ont again, sighing like a sleeper whose breath comes
and goes unconsciously. Gradually the dark bar on the horizon
became clear as if the sediment in an old wine-bottle had sunk
and left the glass green. Behind it, too, the sky cleared as if ihe
white sediment there bad sunk, or as f the arm of a woman
couched beneath the horizon had raised a lamp and flat bars of
white, green and yellow spread across the sky like the blades of a
fan. Then she raised her lamp higher and the air seemed to become
fibrous and to tear away from the greem surface flickering and
flaming in red and yellow fibres like the smoky fire that roars from
a bonfire. Gradually the fibres of the burning bonfire were fused
into one haze, one incandescence which lifted the weight of the woollen
grey sky om top of it and turned it to a million atoms of soft blue.
The surface of the sea slowly became transparent and lay rippling
and sparkling until the dark stripes were almost rubbed ont.
Slowly the arm that held the lamp raised it higher and then higher
until a broad flame became visible ; an arc of fire burnt on the rim
of the horizon, and all round it the sea blazed gold.
The light struck upon the trees in the garden, making one leaf
transparent and then another. One bird chirped bigh np ; there
was a pause; another chirped lower down. The sun sharpened
the walls of the house, and rested like the tip of a fan upon a white
blind and made a blue finger-print of shadow under the leaf by the