Anglesey 



world of heaving water. You are alone in limbo. 

 For the wild things up on the cliffs are not of your 

 world. They belong here ; they are of the water, 

 and know its ways. You thought you knew its 

 ways when you came here, but all the poetry is 

 gone out of it. By all human count, the tide should 

 be now at ebb ; but you do not reason any longer. 

 This same restless sea, which keeps putting its long 

 watery fingers between the blocks and drawing them 

 back again, is like a live thing. It might run up 

 suddenly into that empty gully, and cut you off with 

 a wild sardonic laugh. The shocks of matted seaweed 

 heave and fall on the water around you ; so might 

 the hair of drowned men spread and gather together 

 again in the swell and fall of the waves. 



" Ar-r-r-r-r-r-er I " A guillemot comes in from 

 the sea, uttering its interminable rolling cry as it 

 sweeps on a broad arc like some small black and 

 white aerial torpedo, always with an inward tilt and 

 bias in its flight. The cry means something down 

 here ; for, the bird with the black back barred with 

 white, straddling its one egg on the narrow ledge, 

 and with legs braced to keep its breast to the wall, 

 turned its head, although unable to move its body, 

 as he swept past and out to sea again. The cry 

 means nothing to you ; you are not of this world. 



Or, again, do you hear that low bark as of 

 some sea-dog on the cliffs ; or those meanings as 

 of men in pain ? They are the cries of these same 

 guillemots, but whether for pain or pleasure, in 



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