eathless twilight, to fall
asleep, I suddenly heard a sound as of a child weeping somewhere. My
heart bounded in horror. I lay scarce daring to breathe, and then when
there was silence again, looked up and down the shore for the person
who had cried. But I saw no one. I listened--listened, expecting to
hear the cry again, but only the waves turned the stones, broke,
rolled up, and turned the stones again. Evening crept over the sea,
and the waves looked dark and shadowy; the silence grew more intense.
I turned on one side to go to sleep, and then once more came a sad,
despairing human cry as of a lost child. I sat bolt upright and looked
about me, and even then, whilst I stared, the cry came again, and
from the sea. "Is it possible there is a child down by the waves?" I
thought, and I tried to distinguish some little human shape in the
darkness that seemed hastening on the shoulders of the incoming waves.
There came a terrible wail and another silence. I dared not go and
search, but I lay and shuddered and felt terribly lonely. The waves
followed one another and followed again, ever faster and faster as it
seemed in the darkness--

Still on each wave followed the wave behind,
And then another behind,
And then another behind....

They came forward fantastically, and I felt as if I were lying in the
presence of something most ancient, most terrible.

Presently a bird with great dark wings flew noiselessly just over my
head, and then over the sea rose the moon, young, new drest, and I
forgot the strange cry in the presence of a familiar friend. It was as
if a light had been brought into one's bedroom. Probably the cry was
that of an owl; it came no more. I slept.

V

There was my walk to the forlorn and lonely monastery of Pitsoonda on
the promontory where the great lighthouse burns. Along the seashore
were swamps overgrown with bamboos and giant grasses, twelve feet
high. The sea was grey and calm. Lying on the sand, one saw the
reflection, or the refracted images, of the grey stones at the bottom
of the sea for twenty yards out and more. The sea had no power, it
splashed in weak and hopeless waves, sucked itself away inward, came
back again with a little run, and feebly toppled over. The high-water
line was shown by a serpentine strip of jetsam winding along the whole
of the shore. There was no yellow in the sands; clouds and sunshine
struggled overhead, but beneath them all was grey. The wind rustled in