crude seemed all this love-making when one caught a glimpse of it from
the outside as a large, collective fact!

That, however, proved to be the last encounter, but as he tramped on
over the grey shingle, amid which shone the white sprinkling of chalky
pebbles, a sudden screech pierced the night and a train came rushing
along the track that ran alongside the beach, its engine vomiting a
lurid smoke that showed ghastly in the dark and that disappeared
within the tunnel under the cliff like a giant flame snuffed out. And
soon he had ceased to hear its roaring.

The incident seemed to him symbolic. His flame, too, was to be snuffed
out; but he had the thought, with a grim smile, that he wasn't going
to make so much noise about it.

Now and again he floundered into a puddle or rivulet that flowed
seaward across the expanse of shelving shore, but he felt his sense of
aloneness amid nature increase at each step gained. The pieces of
chalk, scattered on all hands, grew larger and larger, evidently
fallen from above and rounded by the wash of the waves. The patched
whiteness of the cliffs rose high on his right; a tiny, solitary light
shone far out at sea. Clouds were beginning to gather, and some of the
stars were hidden. The night grew darker; the stillness disturbed by
his footsteps alone and the low melody of the gently-breaking waters.
The sea itself stretched before him, a vast, soft shadow, but the eye
had to look at it determinedly to separate it from the sky. And now
"Shakespeare's Cliff" towered up, its side gashed and scarred as by a
giant's axe. The fallen masses lay heaped at its foot, grotesque yet
solemn. Then there were larger masses, piles of enormous boulders on
his right, as if a whole cliff had crashed to fragments; and a great
expanse of them, mossy and weed-covered, stretching on his left to the
water's edge. He was aware of them, too, ahead of him, extending in
the gloom indefinitely. And soon he had to pick out a tortuous way
between the mighty heaps on one hand and the far-spread belt of rock
on the other.

On and on he passed, and stayed at length by a chalk rock, tall as
himself, wrought by the tides into the semblance of a head, a
veritable giant's head, with masses of long, intertangled weeds on its
top and sides, like the strange, wild unkempt locks of a sea-god; its
front showing blurred features like a carven face eaten away by the
slow gnaw of a thousand centuries.

"If you had but a tong