[A Maid of the Silver Sea by John Oxenham]@TWC D-Link book
A Maid of the Silver Sea

CHAPTER XXIII
3/13

Everything was light about him, and yet he could not see more than a couple of feet before his face.

The waves roared hoarsely below him, and once he had unknowingly got so low down that a monstrous white arm, reaching suddenly up out of the depths, seemed about to lay hold on him and drag him back with it into the turmoil.
He was panting and full of mist when at last he climbed the second great rock barrier and rounded the corner towards the south.
And as he sat resting there, the whiff of a westerly breeze tore a long lane in the white shroud, and for a moment he saw, as through a telescope, the houses of Guernsey gleaming in bright sunshine.

Then it closed again, and presently began to drift past him in strange whorls and spirals, like hurrying ghosts wrapped hastily in filmy garments, which loosed at times and trailed slowly over the rocks and caught and clung to their sharp projections.

Then the sun completed the rout, and the mist-ghosts swept away towards France, harried by the west wind like a flock of sheep before the shepherd's dog.
In the afternoon the heat grew so intense that he was driven to the wells in the valley of rocks for a bathe, for there was no shelter available, and his bee-hive was like an oven.
None of the pools was large enough for a swim, and it was more than a man's life was worth to venture among the boiling surges of the outer rocks.

But he could at all events get under water, if it was only to sit there and cool off.
So he stripped, and was just about slipping into a deep still bath, emerald green, with a fringe of amber weeds all round its almost perpendicular sides, when, glancing down to make sure of an ultimate footing, his eye lighted with a shock of surprise on a pair of huge eyes looking straight up at him out of the water.


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