s
filmed with water. It was a mirror in which the sky was inverted. When
a breath of air passed over that polished surface it was as though the
earth were a shining bubble which then nearly burst. To dare that
foothold might precipitate the intruder on ancient magic to cloudland
floating miles beneath the feet. But I had had the propriety to go
barefooted, and had lightened my mind before beginning the voyage. Here
I felt I was breaking into what was still only the first day, for man
had never measured this place with his countless interruptions of
darkness. I don't know whether that mirror had ever been darkened till
I put my foot in it. After the news I had heard on the quay that
morning before starting out, news just arrived from London, the dunes
were an unexpected assurance that the earth has an integrity and purity
of its own, a quality which even man cannot irreparably soil; that it
maintains a pristine health and bloom invulnerable to the best our
heroic and intelligent activities can accomplish, and could easily
survive our extinction, and even forget it once supported us.

I found an empty bottle among the dry litter and drift above the
tide-mark, sole relic, as far as could be seen there, of man. No
message was in the bottle. The black bottle itself was forlornly the
message, but it lay there unregarded by the bright immemorial genius of
that coast. Yet it settled one doubt. This was not a land which had
never known man. It had merely forgotten it had known him. He had been
there, but whatever difference he had made was of the same significance
now as the dry bladder-wrack, the mummied gull near by, and the
bleached shells. The next tide probably would hide the memento for
ever. At the time this did not seem an unhappy thought, though the
relic had been our last witness, so enduring was the tenuous brightness
of the place, the shrine of our particular star, the visible aura of
earth. We rarely see it. It is something to be reminded it is not lost;
that we cannot, whatever else we can do, put out a celestial light.

Above the steep beach a dry flat opened out, reached only by gales and
the highest of the spring tides, a wilderness of fine sand, hot and
deep, its surface studded with the opaque blue of round pebbles and
mussel shells. It looked too arid to support life, but sea-rocket with
fleshy emerald stems and lilac flowers was scattered about. Nothing
moved in the waste but an impulsive small butterfly, b