Delightful tramping along a road high over the shore!  Below me, stretching far to East and to West, blue and glorious like summer, was the immense sea, all in dazzling radiance under the noonday sun.  A bank of grey-blue mist lay over the South, and marked the domain where winter was felt.  Up above me stood great grey rocks, stained here and there the colour of rose porphyry.  The tops of these rocks, even here as I look up at them from Yalta, are outlined with a bright white line—­winter and hoar-frost hold sway there also.

I have been in the sight of nut-brown hillsides, something absolutely perfect, the warm living colour of thousands of little, closely packed French oak trees, all withered, and holding still their little withered leaves.  The colour of these hills was the colour of Nature’s eyes.

There was silence too—­such wonderful silence, one could hear one’s own heart beating.  Such a morning was indeed what Richter calls a “still-creation-day,” that still silence of the heart that prefaces new revelation, as the brooding of the dove on the waters the creation of a world.  You must know I saw the dawn, and have been with the sun all day.  I slept at a Greek coffee-house, but was up whilst the sky was yet dark and the waves all cloudy purple.  There was just one gleam of light in the dark sky, just one little promise.  The great cliffs were all in their night cloaks, and night shapes were on the road.  All Nature was in the night world, and I felt as if I were continuing my last night’s tramping, and not starting upon a new day.  Yet in the night of my heart was also just that one gleam of whiteness in the East, one little promise.  I knew the whiteness must get more and more, and the darkness less and less.  I stood on the cliff road and watched the waves become all alive, playing with their shadows as the light diffused in the sky, and the white lines of the East turned to rosy ribbons.  Then the dawn twilight came and the night shapes slunk away.  The Tartars and Greeks took down their shutters in the little village hard by.

The sea became green, the rocks all grey, and then, as I watched, the rim of the sun rose over the horizon and the sea held it as a scimitar of fire.  The white disc rose, a miracle; it looked very large, as if it had grown bigger in the night.  It paused a moment in the sea and then suddenly seemed to bound up from it:  it flooded the world with light.  Then, as if from his hands angels were leaping, thousands of gulls were descried on the sea, their gleaming wings seeming to be the very meaning of morning.  Out of the sea under the dawn, dark dolphins came leaping toward the shore.  The sea became a grey expanse over which the sun made a silver roadway.  There commenced the quiet, quiet morning, and the still-creation-day.