II
At Dzhugba the sea was quiet as a little lake; at Dagomise it was many-crested and thundering in the majesty of storm. At Gudaout the sun rose over it as it might have done on the first morning of the world.
Every dawning I bathed, and each bathing was as a new baptism. And in multifarious places it was given to me to bathe; at Dzhugba, where the sun shone fiercely on green water and the dark seaweed washed to and fro on the rocks; at Olginka, the quietest little bay imaginable, where the sea was so clear that one could count the stones below it, the rippling water so crystalline that it tempted one to stoop down and drink—a dainty spot—even the stones, on long curves of the shore, seemed to have been nicely arranged by the sea the night before, and far as I swam out to sea I saw the bottom as through glass.
How different at Dagomise! All night long it had thundered. I slept under a wooden bridge that spanned a dried-up river. The lightning played all about me, the rain roared, the thunder crashed overhead. The storm passed, but as the thunder died away from the sky, it broke out from the sea and roared deafeningly all around. I could not bathe, for the sea was tremendous. A grand sight presented itself at dawn, the sea foaming forwards in thousands of billows. Along five miles of seashore the white horses galloped forward against the rocks, as if the whole sea were an army arrayed against the land. How the white pennons flew!
Later in the morning I undressed, and sitting in moderate safety on a shelf of rock, let the spent billows rush over me. The waves rushed up the steep beach like tigers for their prey, their eyes turned away from mine, but full of cruelty and anger. I was, deep in myself, afear'd.
At what an extraordinary rate the waves rushed up the shore, fast galloping after one another, accomplishing their fates! There is only one line I know that tells well of their rate, that glory of Swinburne:—
Where the dove dipped her wing and the oars won their way,
Where the narrowing Symplègades whiten the straits of Propontis
with spray.