Look to the Stars

by Willard E. Hawkins

From a narrow strip of shore that fringed a murky sea, sheer cliffs rose—black, beetling, forbidding. In one direction the rampart lost itself in the haze of a bleak horizon; in the other it merged into a rocky but sloping ascent.

The sea itself was of a muddy hue, reflecting feebly the rays of a sun which seemed to begrudge what little warmth it spared. The sky, gray though nearly cloudless, seemed overcast with a dusty haze.

Where the sea washed into a narrow inlet at the foot of the last great promontory along the line of ramparts, a boulder—distinguished from others because it seemed grayer, smoother, more friable—contributed to the muddiness of the sea.

Each time the tide rose and the waters swept over it, they softened and dissolved some of its outer coating. As the tides receded, they left a blob of mud, which slowly hardened through exposure to the sun, only to soften and disintegrate a trifle more at the next return of the tide.

It was an irregular tide. Its surges occurred in unpredictable cycles and in varying degrees of intensity. On a few occasions its high level reached a mark far up the cliff; on others it forgot to recede for a time; and yet again it was such a feeble tide that it barely washed the base of the boulder, which was in reality a clod of hard-baked clay.

Now and again, after the tide receded, some furry object lay gasping in the sun, and presently scuttled toward the less precipitous stretch of shore. Or a bird fluttered to the rampart, or a cricket vented a dismal chirp and sought the damp underside of a rock. In a nearby cleft, a scattering of seeds had been caught in the backwash of tide and blades of grass clung tenaciously to a meager deposit of soil.

How long the sea had washed this blob of clay could only have been estimated by some observer who noted its size when it was first carried down to water level in a rock slide, and watched the progress of its disintegration. But there was no observer to note these things.

There came a day—a day like many another, cloudless, murky, cold—when it would have been apparent, had such an observer existed, that imbedded within the blob of mud was a foreign object. It might have been a log, for all the amorphous outlines revealed. Whatever it was, the water continued to wash at intervals over the coating, and gradually carried it away. As this continued, the uncovered portions of whatever lay within gradually seemed to lose their gray, desiccated look.

And there came another day when the coating was gone, and after the tide had receded and the sun had poured its rays down with unusual warmth for some hours, a quiver ran through the outstretched object.

The tide returned. As it gently lapped the figure on the sands, some instinct of preservation stirred in that which had been nothing but a core of foreign matter in a blob of clay. It shivered slightly and squirmed to a higher position on the shore.