CHAPTER IX
LYING flat upon the dune, face downward, my elbows sunk in the sand with head buried in my hands, and staring into the space before me, I dream. . . . The sea is in front of me, immense and glaucous, streaked with violet shadows, plowed by mighty billows whose crests, rising and falling back and forth, are white in the sun. The reefs of la Gamelle from time to time uncover the dark points of their rocks and send forth a dull noise like a distant cannonade. Yesterday the tempest broke loose; today the wind has subsided, but the sea still refuses to quiet down. The waves come up, swell, roll, rise, toss up their manes of swirling foam, break into ripples and fall back upon the pebbles, flat and broken, with a frightful roar of rage. But the sky no longer threatens, streaks of blue appear between the rifts of clouds swiftly borne away, and the seagulls are soaring high in the air. The fishing boats have just left the harbor, they are receding in the distance, diminishing, separating, becoming indistinct and finally vanishing. To my right, dominated by sinking dunes, is the strand extending as far as Ploch, which one can see behind a rise in the ground in the midst of dreary verdure, the roofs of the nearest houses, the belfry of granite stone at the end of which there rises a lighthouse. Beyond the pier the eye can see limitless expanses of pink shores, silvery bays, soft-blue cliffs covered with mist, so faint in the distance that they look like columns of vapor, and the ever present sea and the ever present sky which blend together yonder into a sort of mysterious and poignant elimination
