Supper on the Beach

The flickering shadows of many myths still dance, like candle flames, along the inner walls of sea caves. For there, by the light of dying beachfires, where men and women of this country have come in the evening since the discoverers, the darkness booms from the crash of unseen waves against the ends of subterranean passageways. Babies cry and lovers draw together, half in fun, half in unexplainable fear. And old people poke the fire and look about, as though they were looking for lost children. The darkness booms, the darkness whistles suddenly when small tatters of wind are drawn between eroded fissures of the rock. They tell of long lost treasure hidden there, of guardian ghosts, of bodies still floating about below, bumping softly from side to side in the light-less caverns. Even a seal barking from the outer rocks might be a monster. And when the moon is gone, when the only light is the ghostly trace of foam from breakers on the beach, when the wind-and-sea-carved cliffs reach down with grotesque knobs and leaning limbs and eye holes, when lower ledges glisten and blobs of seaweed underfoot turn and yield, the men and women who have come there since the discoverers have long since picked their way between the tide pools and up the steep cliff-paths.