able to pass, we had to wait
until the breakers receded. We watched them approach us. They dashed
against the rocks, swirled in the crevices, rose like scarfs on the
wind, fell back in drops and sprays, and with one long, sweeping
libration, gathered their green waters together and retreated. When one
wave left the sand, its currents immediately joined, and sought lower
levels. The sea-weed moved its slimy branches; the water bubbled between
the pebbles, oozed through the cracks of the rocks and formed a thousand
rivulets and fountains. The drenched sand absorbed it all, and soon its
yellow tint grew white again through the drying action of the sun.

As soon as we could, we jumped over the rocks and continued on our way.
Soon, however, they increased in numbers, their weird groups being
crowded together, piled up and overturned on one another. We tried to
hold on with our hands and feet, but we slid on their slippery
asperities. The cliff was so very high that it quite frightened us to
look up at it. Although it crushed us by its formidable placidity, still
it fascinated us, for we could not help looking at it and it did not
tire our eyes.

A swallow passed us and we watched its flight; it came from the sea; it
ascended slowly through the air, cutting the luminous, fluid atmosphere
with its sharp, outstretched wings that seemed to enjoy being absolutely
untrammelled. The bird ascended higher and higher, rose above the cliff
and finally disappeared.

Meanwhile we were creeping over the rocks, the perspective of which was
renewed by each bend of the coast. Once in a while, when the rocks
ended, we walked on square stones that were as flat as marble slabs and
seamed by almost symmetrical furrows, which appeared like the tracks of
some ancient road of another world.

In some places were great pools of water as calm as their greenish
depths and as limpid and motionless as a woodland stream on its bed of
cresses. Then the rocks would reappear closer than before and more
numerous. On one side was the ocean with its breakers foaming around the
lower rocks; on the other, the straight, unrelenting, impassive coast.

Tired and bewildered, we looked about us for some issue; but the cliff
stretched out before us, and the rocks, infinitely multiplying their
dark green forms, succeeded one another until their unequal crags seemed
like so many tall, black phantoms rising out of the earth.

We stumbled around in this way until we