At the edge of the sea

The shore is an ancient world, for as long as there has been an earth and se a there has been this place of the meeting of land and water. Yet it is a world that keeps alive the sense of continuing creation and of the relentless¹ drive of life. Each time that I enter it, I gain some new awareness² of its beauty and it sdeeper meanings, sensing that intricate fabric³ of life by which one creature is linked with another, and each with its surroundings.

 

In my thoughts of the shore, one place stands apart for its revelation of exquisite⁴ beauty. It is a pool hidden within a cave that one can visit only rarely and briefly⁵ when the lowest of the year's low tides fall below it, and perhaps from that very fact it acquires some of its special beauty. Choosing such a tide , I hoped for a glimpse of the pool. The ebb⁶ was to fall early in the morning. I knew that if the wind held from the northwest and no interfering⁷ swell⁸ ran in from a distant storm the level of the sea should drop below the entrance to the pool. There had been sudden ominous⁹ showers in the night, with rain like handfuls of gravel¹⁰ flung on the roof. When I looked out into the early morning the sky was full of a gray dawn light but the sun had not yet risen. Water and air were pallid¹¹. Across the bay the moon was a luminous¹² disc in the western sky, suspended above the dim line of distant shore -- the full August moon, drawing the tide to the low, low levels of the threshold of the alien sea world. As I watched, a gull¹³ flew by, above the spruces. Its breast was rosy¹⁴ with the light of the unrisen sun. The day was, after all, to be fair.

 

Later, as I stood above the tide near the entrance to the pool, the promise of that rosy light was sustained. From the base of the steep wall of rock on which I stood, a moss¹⁵ covered ledge¹⁶ jutted¹⁷ seaward into deep water. In the surge at the rim¹⁸ of the ledge the dark fronds¹⁹ of oarweeds swayed smooth and gleaming as leather. The projecting ledge was the path to the small hidden cave and its pool. Occasionally a swell, stronger than the rest, rolled smoothly²⁰ over the rim and broke in foam²¹ against the cliff. But the intervals²² between such swells²³ were lo ng enough to admit me to the ledge and long enough for a glimpse of that fairy pool, so seldom and so briefly exposed.

 

And so I knelt on the wet carpet of sea moss and looked back into the dark cavern²⁴ that held the pool in a shallow basin. The floor of the cave was only a fewinches below the roof, and a mirror had been created in which all that grew on the ceiling was reflected in the still water below.

 

Under water that was clear as glass the pool was carpeted with green sponge. Gray patches of sea squirts glistened²⁵ on the ceiling and colonies of raft coral were a pale apricot color. In the moment when I looked into the cave a little e lfin starfish hung down, suspended by the merest thread, perhaps by only a single tube foot. It reached down to touch its own reflection, so perfectly²⁶ delineated that there might have been, not one starfish, but two. The beauty of the refle cted images and of the limpid²⁷ pool itself was the poignant²⁸ beauty of things that are ephemeral, existing only until the sea should return to fill the little cave.

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