The sun was slanting towards the west; the skies seemed like brass; the air was sharp, yet scorching; the dull brown earth still rose up before them like a wall; they climbed it slowly and painfully, their hands and their teeth filled with its dust, that drifted in a cloud before them. He bade her close her eyes, and she obeyed him. He stretched his arm out and drew her after him up the ascent that was slippery from drought and prickly from the stunted growth of furze.
On the summit he stood still and released her.
"Now look."
She opened her eyes with the startled half-questioning stare of one led out from utter darkness into a full and sudden light.
Then, with a cry, she sank down on the rock, trembling, weeping, laughing, stretching out her arms to the new glory that met her sight, dumb with its grandeur, delirious with its delight.
For what she saw was the sea.
Before her dazzled sight all its beauty stretched, the blueness of the waters meeting the blueness of the skies; radiant with all the marvels of its countless hues; softly stirred by a low wind that sighed across it; bathed in a glow of gold that streamed on it from the westward; rolling from north to south in slow sonorous measure, filling the silent air with ceaseless melody. The luster of the sunset beamed upon it; the cool fresh smell of its water shot like new life through all the scorch and stupor of the day; its white foam curled and broke on the brown curving rocks and wooded inlets of the shores; innumerable birds, that gleamed like silver, floated or flew above its surface; all was still, still as death, save only for the endless movement of those white swift wings and the susurrus of the waves, in which all meaner and harsher sounds of earth seemed lost and hushed to slumber and to silence.
The sea alone reigned, as it reigned in the sweet young years of the earth when men were not; as, maybe, it will be its turn to reign again in the years to come, when men and all their works shall have passed away and be no more seen nor any more remembered.
Arslàn watched her in silence.
He was glad that it should awe and move her thus. The sea was the only thing for which he cared; or which had any power over him. In the northern winter of his youth he had known the ocean in one wild night's work undo all that men had done to check and rule it, and burst through all the barriers that they had raised against it, and throw down the stones of the altar and quench the fires of the hearth, and sweep through the fold and the byre, and flood the cradle of the child and the grave of the grandsire. He had seen the storms wash away at one blow the corn harvests of years, and gather in the sheep from the hills, and take the life of the shepherd with the life of the flock. He had seen it claim lovers locked in each other's arms, and toss the fair curls of the first-born as it tossed the ribbon-weeds of its deeps. And he had felt small pity; it had rather given him a sense of rejoicing and triumph to see the water laugh to scorn those who were so wise in their own conceit, and bind beneath its chains those who held themselves masters over all beasts of the field and birds of the air.