Although O'Flaherty does not name the setting of his story "The Wave," it's almost certainly set somewhere on the Aran Islands. The story begins with the description of an imposing cliff, two hundred feet high, that sits facing the sea. It is semicircular, with a twenty foot high cavern at its base, a concave area that "the sea had eaten up . . . during thousands of years of battle."

It is not quite high tide as the story opens. The sea is angry, and waves come "towering into the cove" formed by the cliff and the two reefs at each end of its semicircle. These waves are separate, and O'Flaherty uses violent language to describe them as they "[chase] one another, [climb] over one another's backs, [spit] savage columns of green and white water vertically when their arched manes [clash]." They hurl themselves against the cliff, then retreat...