II

The seas are the heart’s blood of the earth. Plucked up and kneaded by

the sun and the moon, the tides are systole and diastole of earth’s

veins.

The rhythm of waves beats in the sea like a pulse in living flesh.

It is pure force, forever embodying itself in a succession of watery

shapes which vanish on its passing.

I stand on my dune top watching a great wave coursing in from sea, and

know that I am watching an illusion, that the distant water has not

left its place in ocean to advance upon me, but only a force shaped in

water, a bodiless pulse beat, a vibration.

Consider the marvel of what we see. Somewhere in ocean, perhaps a

thousand miles and more from this beach, the pulse beat of earth

liberates a vibration, an ocean wave. Is the original force circular, I

wonder? and do ocean waves ring out from the creative beat as they do

on a quiet surface broken by a stone? Are there, perhaps, ocean circles

so great and so intricate that they are unperceived? Once created, the

wave or the arc of a wave begins its journey through the sea. Countless

vibrations precede it, countless vibrations follow after. It approaches

the continent, swings into the coast line, courses ashore, breaks,

dissolves, is gone. The innermost waters it last inhabited flow back in

marbly foam to become a body to another beat, and to be again flung

down. So it goes night and day, and will go till the secret heart of

earth strikes out its last slow beat and the last wave dissolves upon

the last forsaken shore.

[Illustration: _Slide and Seethe_]

As I stand on my dune top, however, I do not think of the illusion and

the beat of earth, for I watch the waves with my outer rather than my

inner eye. After all, the illusion is set off by an extraordinary,

an almost miraculous thing--the embodiment of the wave beat in an

almost constant shape. We see a wave a quarter of a mile off, then

a few hundred yards nearer in, then just offshore; we seem to have

been watching the same travelling mass of water--there has been no

appreciable change in mass or in shape--yet all the while the original

beat has taken on a flowing series of liquid bodies, bodies so alike,

so much the same, that our eye will individualize them and follow them

in--the third wave, we say, or the second wave behind the great wave.

How strange it is that this beat of earth, this mysterious undulation

of the seas, moving through and among the other forces stirring the

waters close off the continent, should thus keep its constancy of form

and mass, and how odd a blend of illusion and reality it all is! On

the whole, the outer eye has the best of it.

Blowing all day long, a northwest wind yesterday swept the sky clear of

every tatter and wisp of cloud. Clear it still is, though the wind has

shifted to the east. The sky this afternoon is a harmony of universal

blue, bordered with a surf rim of snowiest blue-white. Far out at sea,

in the northeast and near the horizon, is a pool of the loveliest

blue I have ever seen here--a light blue, a petal blue, blue of the

emperor’s gown in a Chinese fairy tale. If you would see waves at their

best, come on such a day, when the ocean reflects a lovely sky, and the

wind is light and onshore; plan to arrive in the afternoon so that you

will have the sun facing the breakers. Come early, for the glints on

the waves are most beautiful and interesting when the light is oblique

and high. And come with a rising tide.

The surf is high, and on the far side of it, a wave greater than its

fellows is shouldering out of the blue, glinting immensity of sea.

Friends tell me that there are certain tropic beaches where waves miles

long break all at once in one cannonading crash: a little of this, I

imagine, would be magnificent; a constancy of it, unbearable. The surf

here is broken; it approaches the beach in long intercurrent parallels,

some a few hundred feet long, some an eighth of a mile long, some, and

the longest, attaining the quarter-mile length and perhaps just over.

Thus, at all times and instants of the day, along the five miles of

beach visible from the Fo’castle deck, waves are to be seen breaking,

coursing in to break, seething up and sliding back.

But to return to the blue wave rolling in out of the blue spaciousness

of sea. On the other side of the world, just opposite the Cape, lies

the ancient Spanish province of Galicia, and the town of Pontevedra and

St. James Compostella, renowned of pilgrims. (When I was there they

offered me a silver cockle shell, but I would have none of it, and got

myself a sea shell from some Galician fisherfolk.) Somewhere between

this Spanish land and Cape Cod the pulse of earth has engendered this

wave and sent it coursing westward through the seas. Far off the coast,

the spray of its passing has, perhaps, risen on the windward bow of

some rusty freighter and fallen in rainbow drops upon her plates; the

great liners have felt it course beneath their keels.

A continent rises in the west, and the pulse beat approaches this

bulwark of Cape Cod. Two thirds of a mile out, the wave is still a sea

vibration, a billow. Slice it across, and its outline will be that

of a slightly flattened semi-circle; the pulse is shaped in a long,

advancing mound. I watch it approach the beach. Closer and closer in,

it is rising with the rise of the beach and the shoaling of the water;

closer still, it is changing from a mound to a pyramid, a pyramid which

swiftly distorts, the seaward side lengthening, the landward side

incurving--the wave is now a breaker. Along the ridge of blue forms a

rippling crest of clear, bright water; a little spray flies off. Under

the racing foam churned up by the dissolution of other breakers the

beach now catches at the last shape of sea inhabited by the pulse--the

wave is _tripped_ by the shoaling sand--the giant stumbles, crashes,

and is pushed over and ahead by the sloping line of force behind. The

fall of a breaker is never the work of gravity alone.

It is the last line of the wave that has captured the decorative

imagination of the world--the long seaward slope, the curling crest,

the incurved volute ahead.

[Illustration: _Summer Breakers_]

Toppling over and hurled ahead, the wave crashes, its mass of glinting

blue falling down in a confusion of seething, splendid white, the

tumbling water rebounding from the sand to a height almost always a

little above that of the original crest. Out of the wild, crumbling

confusion born of the dissolution of the force and the last great

shape, foamy fountains spurt, and ringlets of spray. The mass of water,

still all furiously a-churn and seething white, now rushes for the

rim of the beach as it might for an inconceivable cataract. Within

thirty-five feet the water shoals from two feet to dry land. The edge

of the rush thins, and the last impulse disappears in inch-deep slides

of foam which reflect the sky in one last moment of energy and beauty

and then vanish all at once into the sands.

Another thundering, and the water that has escaped and withdrawn is

gathered up and swept forward again by another breaking wave. Night and

day, age after age, so works the sea, with infinite variation obeying

an unalterable rhythm moving through an intricacy of chance and law.

I can watch a fine surf for hours, taking pleasure in all its wild

plays and variations. I like to stand on my beach, watching a long

wave start breaking in many places, and see the curling water run north

and south from the several beginnings, and collide in furious white

pyramids built of the opposing energies. Splendid fountains often

delight the eye. A towering and deep-bellied wave, toppling, encloses

in its volute a quantity of air, and a few seconds after the spill this

prisoned and compressed vapour bursts up through the boiling rush in

feathery, foamy jets and geyser plumes. I have seen fountains here,

on a September day, twenty and twenty-five and even thirty feet high.

Sometimes a curious thing happens. Instead of escaping vertically, the

rolled-up air escapes horizontally, and the breaker suddenly blows, as

from a dragon’s mouth, a great lateral puff of steamy spray. On sunny

days, the toppling crest is often mirrored in the glassy volute as

the wave is breaking. One lovely autumn afternoon, I saw a beautiful

white gull sailing along the volute of a breaker accompanied by his

reflection in the wave.

I add one curious effect of the wind. When the wind is directly

offshore or well offshore, the waves approach fighting it; when the

wind is offshore but so little off that its angle with the coast line

is oblique--say an angle never greater than twenty-two degrees and

never less than about twelve--the waves that approach the coast do not

give battle, but run in with their long axis parallel to the wind.

Sitting in the Fo’castle, I can often tell the exact quarter of an

offshore wind simply by looking at this oblique alignment of the waves.

The long miles of beach are never more beautiful than when waves are

rolling in fighting a strong breeze. Then do the breakers actually seem

to charge the coast. As they approach, the wind meets them in a shock

of war, the chargers rear but go on, and the wind blows back their

manes. North and south, I watch them coursing in, the manes of white,

sun brilliant spray streaming behind them for thirty and even forty

feet. Sea horses do men call such waves on every coast of the world.

If you would see them at their best, come to this beach on a bright

October day when a northwest wind is billowing off to sea across the

moors.