CHAPTER II 



ON THE CLIFFS 



The sea lay below, far below, and stretching like 

 a sapphire meadow to the rim of the world. 



You could hear the song of the breakers in the 

 cave and on the sand, and the cry of the seaguUs 

 from the cHif and rock, and the breeze amidst the 

 cliff grass, but these sounds only emphasised the 

 silence of the great sunht sapphire sea. 



The sea is a very silent thing. Three thousand 

 miles of pampas grass would emit more sound 

 under the lash of the wind than the whole Atlantic 

 Ocean; and a swallow in its flight makes more 

 sound than the forty-foot wave, that can wreck a 

 pier or break a ship, makes in its passage towards 

 the shore. 



Up here, far above the shore, the faint, sonorous, 

 tune of wave upon wave breaking upon the sands 

 below served only to accentuate the essential 

 silence of the sea. 



Through this sound could be distinguished 

 another, immense, faint, dream-like — the breath- 

 ing of leagues of coast. A sound made up of the 

 boom of billows in the sea-caves, and the bursting 

 of waves on rock and strand, but so indefinite, so 



vague that, Ustening, one sometimes fancied it to 



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