Christian fiction; Neighborhoods -- Scotland -- Fiction
“We blew it up rather than surrender,” said Dora. “We did; only Harry
always forgets, and says it was the water did it.”
I drew near the rock that held the bath. I had never approached it from
this side before. It was high above my head, and a stream of water was
flowing from it. I scrambled up, undressed, and plunged into its dark
hollow, where I felt like one of the sea-beasts of which I had been
dreaming, down in the caves of the unvisited ocean. But the sun was over
my head, and the air with an edge of the winter was about me. I dressed
quickly, descended on the other side of the rock, and wandered again on
the sands to seaward of the breakwater, which lay above, looking dry
and weary, and worn with years of contest with the waves, which had at
length withdrawn defeated to their own country, and left it as if to
victory and a useless age of peace. How different was the scene when a
raving mountain of water filled all the hollow where I now wandered,
and rushed over the top of that mole now so high above me; and I had
to cling to its stones to keep me from being carried off like a bit
of floating sea-weed! This was the loveliest and strangest part of the
shore. Several long low ridges of rock, of whose existence I scarcely
knew, worn to a level with the sand, hollowed and channelled with the
terrible run of the tide across them, and looking like the old and
outworn cheek-teeth of some awful beast of prey, stretched out seawards.
Here and there amongst them rose a well-known rock, but now so changed
in look by being lifted all the height between the base on the waters,
and the second base in the sand, that I wondered at each, walking round
and viewing it on all sides. It seemed almost a fresh growth out of the
garden of the shore, with uncouth hollows around its fungous root, and
a forsaken air about its brows as it stood in the dry sand and looked
seaward. But what made the chief delight of the spot, closed in by
rocks from the open sands, was the multitude of fairy rivers that
flowed across it to the sea. The gladness these streams gave me I cannot
communicate. The tide had filled thousands of hollows in the breakwater,
hundreds of cracked basins in the rocks, huge sponges of sand; from all
of which--from cranny and crack, and oozing sponge--the water flowed in
restricted haste back, back to the sea, tumbling in tiny cataracts
down the faces of the rocks, bubbling from their roots as from wells,
gathering in tanks of sand, and overflowing in broad shallow streams,
curving and sweeping in their sandy channels, just like, the great
rivers of a continent;--here spreading into smooth silent lakes and
reaches, here babbling along in ripples and waves innumerable--flowing,
flowing, to lose their small beings in the same ocean that met on the
other side the waters of the Mississippi, the Orinoco, the Amazon. All
their channels were of golden sand, and the golden sunlight was above
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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