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 the giant grasses like the sound of men on horseback, so that I was continually looking behind in apprehension.

  A land that is lonelier than ruin,
  A sea that is stranger than death.

At a lonely house, half-way to the monastery, I thought to obtain bread, but as I approached it twelve large brown mastiffs rushed out and assailed me.  I was in a pitiable plight, warding them off with my stick, and did not escape without bites.  I called for help, and some one then whistled from a window and called the dogs back.  I don’t fear dogs, but these were powerful animals, and withal a tremendous surprise.  I must have had a bad time had no one called them away.

I came to the river Bzib, deep and fast-running, and rowed myself across in a leaky and muddy boat.  I ploughed my way through deep sand, or stepped from boulder to boulder, or crushed through miles of sea-holly and prickly shrub.  I came to the sacred wood in which the Ahkbasians used to pray when they were pagans, but in which, since their conversion, they have chiefly committed murder.  I passed through three strange woods, the first of juniper and wild pear; the second, all dead, bleached and impenetrable, of what had once been hawthorn, but now one jagged, fixed mass of awkward arms and cruel thorns; the third, a beautiful, spacious pine-wood, climbing over cliffs to the far verge of the cape where the lighthouse flashes.  These were like woods in a fairy tale, and may well have had each their own particular elves and spirits.  Each had a separate character:  the first as of the earth, homely, full of gentle russet colours from the juniper and the wild fruit; the second, haggish, full of witches whose finger-nails had never been clipped; the third, queenly, as if beloved of Diana.