tempt a description, I am
obliged to confess that I can do no better than the child." The fact
is, the sea describes us; that is why we cannot describe it. It is,
itself, language and metaphor for the telling of our own longings and
our own mysteries. In the sound of the waves is only the song of man's
life; in the endless variety of its appearance only the story of our
own mystery.

Thus the sea is all things. They call this the Black Sea, and at
evening when the clouds in the high heaven are reflected in it, it is
indeed black. But it should be called the many-coloured, for indeed it
is all colours. In the full heat of noon, as I write, it is white; it
is covered with half-visible vapour through which a greenness is lost
in pallor. The horizon is the black line of a broken arc. Other days
it is blue as a great ripe plum, and the horizon is faint-pink, like
down. On cloudy afternoons it is grey with unmingled sorrow; in early
morning it is joyous as a young child. I have seen it from a distance
piled up to the sky like a wall of hard sapphire. I have seen it
near at hand faint away from the shore, colourless, lifeless, in the
heart-searching of its ebb tide. It is all things, at all times, and
to all persons.

II

At Dzhugba the sea was quiet as a little lake; at Dagomise it was
many-crested and thundering in the majesty of storm. At Gudaout the
sun rose over it as it might have done on the first morning of the
world.

Every dawning I bathed, and each bathing was as a new baptism. And in
multifarious places it was given to me to bathe; at Dzhugba, where the
sun shone fiercely on green water and the dark seaweed washed to and
fro on the rocks; at Olginka, the quietest little bay imaginable,
where the sea was so clear that one could count the stones below it,
the rippling water so crystalline that it tempted one to stoop down
and drink--a dainty spot--even the stones, on long curves of the
shore, seemed to have been nicely arranged by the sea the night
before, and far as I swam out to sea I saw the bottom as through
glass.

How different at Dagomise! All night long it had thundered. I slept
under a wooden bridge that spanned a dried-up river. The lightning
played all about me, the rain roared, the thunder crashed overhead.
The storm passed, but as the thunder died away from the sky, it broke
out from the sea and roared deafeningly all around. I could not bathe,
for the sea was tremendous. A grand sight presente