II
In my open, treeless world, the year is at flood tide. All day long and all night long, for four days and five days, the southwest wind blows across the Cape with the tireless constancy of a planetary river. The sun, descending the altar of the year, pauses ritually on the steps of the summer months, the disk of flame overflowing. On hot days the beach is tremulous with rising, visible heat bent seaward by the wind; a blue haze hangs inland over the moors and the great marsh blotting out pictorial individualities and reducing the landscape to a mass. Dune days are sometimes hotter than village days, for the naked glare of sand reflects the heat; dune nights are always cooler. On its sun-trodden sand, between the marsh wind and the coolness of ocean, the Fo’castle has been as comfortable as a ship at sea.
The duneland air burns with the smell of sand, ocean, and sun. On the tops of the hills, the grass stands at its tallest and greenest, its new straw-green seed plumes rising through a dead crop of last year’s withered spears. On some leaves there is already a tiny spot of orange wither at the very tip, and thin lines of wither descending on either edge. Grasses in the salt meadows are fruiting; there are brownish and greenish-yellow patches on the levels of summer green. On the dunes, the sand lies quiescent in a tangle of grass; in naked places, it lies as if it were held down by the sun. When there has been no rain for a week or more, and the slanting flame has been heavy on the beach, the sand in my path down Fo’castle dune becomes so dry, so loose and deep, that I trudge through it as through snow.
The winter sea was a mirror in a cold, half-lighted room, the summer sea is a mirror in a room burning with light. So abundant is the light and so huge the mirror that the whole of a summer day floats reflected on the glass. Colours gather there, sunrise and twilight, cloud shadows and cloud reflections, the pewter dullness of gathering rain, the blue, burning splendour of space swept free of every cloud. Light transfixes ocean, and some warmth steals in with the light, but the waves that glint in the sun are still a tingling cold.
Now do insects inherit the warm earth. When a sluggish wind blows from the marsh on a hot day, the dunes can be tropical. The sand quivers with insect lives. On such days, “greenheads,” Tabanus costalis, stab and buzz, sand gnats or “no-see-ums” gather in myriads on the sun-drenched south wall of the house, “flatiron flies” and minor unknowns swarm to the attack. One must remain indoors or take a precarious refuge at the ocean’s very edge. Thanks to the wind, the coolness, and the spray, the lower beach is usually free of insect bloodletters, though the bullying, poisonous Tabanid, in the mid-August height of his season, can be a hateful nuisance. So far, however, I have had but two of these tropical visitations. Barring an extra allowance of greenheads, the dunes are probably quite as habitable as any stretch of outermost beach. The wind, moreover, saves me from mosquitoes.
Ants have appeared, and the upper beach is pitted with their hills; I watch the tiny, red-brown creatures running in and out of buried weed. Just outside each hole, the fine sand is all delicately ascrawl with the small, endless comings and goings. The whole upper beach, indeed, has become a plain of intense and minute life; there are tunnels and doors and pitways everywhere. The dune locusts that were so small in June have grown large and learned to make a sound. All up and down the dunes, sometimes swept seaward out of their course by the west wind, go various butterflies. When I turn up driftwood in the dunes, or walk the wheel ruts in the meadows, crickets race off into the grass.
On the dunes, in open places near thin grass, I find the deep, finger-round mine shafts of the dune spider. A foot below, in the cooler sand, lives the black female; dig her up, and you will find a hairy, spidery ball. During the summer months the lady does not leave her cave, but in early autumn she revisits the world and scuttles through the dune grass, black, fast, and formidable. The smaller, sand-coloured male runs about everywhere. I saw one on the beach the other night, running along in cloudy moonlight, and mistook him at first for a small crab. Later the same night, I found a tiny, sand-coloured dune toad at the very brim of the surf, and wondered if an appetite for beach fleas had led him there.
“June bugs,” Lachnosterna arcuata, strike my screens with a formidable boom and linger there formidably buzzing; let me but open the door, and half a dozen are tilting at my table lamp and falling stunned upon the cloth. On mounded slopes of sand, solitary black wasps scratch themselves out a cave; across my paths move the shadows of giant dragon flies.
The straggling beach peas of the region are in bloom; the west wind blows the grass and rushes out to the rippled levels of a level sea; heat clouds hang motionless on the land horizon, their lower rims lost in the general haze; the great sun overflows; the year burns on.