Let me swim too with the fish,
And the clouds and the sun,
Hurry waves, hurry wind.
The boat I make wounds the
Face of the water. Enough! Enough!
Perhaps it was not music, nor poetry, nor sense, but as the voice shrilly mounted the sloping rocks and called from all their crannies, their hiding nooks, their inviolate grottoes the—till then—unused echoes, the Woman leaped and danced, her bundle dropped from her arm, and with hands outstretched to the ocean, her face radiant and laughing, she swung to and fro, pacing and stamping the ground in a circle.
Then a stranger thing happened, and something more grave and beautiful.
Lhatto knelt and bowed to the far-away sea, and her voice became silent. So the Woman there in the Earth’s Dawn begat music and poetry and worship; the mists from the ocean spread about her, the swarming voices of the day entered her ears, and perchance far down in her perturbed soul, by some skill of the Great Intention, she saw and heard the hurrying centuries rampant with life, pregnant with passion, furious with ambition, prostrate—as she had been before the sea—prostrate before a Woman’s form, and voice, and soul.
Lhatto rose, resumed her burden and hastened to the edge of the cliff where the path abruptly ended in a disjointed natural ladder of stone leading aimlessly, and, as if by preference, dangerously down the vertical face of the dike.
Lhatto certainly felt no diffidence. From point to point she descended with ease, leaping with careless accuracy, and scarcely pausing in her rapid and twisting course. Suddenly her onward motion ceased. She had reached the lowest step visible from the edge of the bluff; below was a long interval, perhaps twenty feet to the rolled pebbles on the beach now rapidly succumbing to the inundation of the inflowing tide.