In my open, treeless world, the year is at flood tide. All day long
and all night long, for four days and five days, the southwest wind
blows across the Cape with the tireless constancy of a planetary
river. The sun, descending the altar of the year, pauses ritually on
the steps of the summer months, the disk of flame overflowing. On hot
days the beach is tremulous with rising, visible heat bent seaward by
the wind; a blue haze hangs inland over the moors and the great marsh
blotting out pictorial individualities and reducing the landscape to a
mass. Dune days are sometimes hotter than village days, for the naked
glare of sand reflects the heat; dune nights are always cooler. On its
sun-trodden sand, between the marsh wind and the coolness of ocean, the
Fo’castle has been as comfortable as a ship at sea.
The duneland air burns with the smell of sand, ocean, and sun. On the
tops of the hills, the grass stands at its tallest and greenest, its
new straw-green seed plumes rising through a dead crop of last year’s
withered spears. On some leaves there is already a tiny spot of orange
wither at the very tip, and thin lines of wither descending on either
edge. Grasses in the salt meadows are fruiting; there are brownish and
greenish-yellow patches on the levels of summer green. On the dunes,
the sand lies quiescent in a tangle of grass; in naked places, it lies
as if it were held down by the sun. When there has been no rain for a
week or more, and the slanting flame has been heavy on the beach, the
sand in my path down Fo’castle dune becomes so dry, so loose and deep,
that I trudge through it as through snow.
The winter sea was a mirror in a cold, half-lighted room, the summer
sea is a mirror in a room burning with light. So abundant is the light
and so huge the mirror that the whole of a summer day floats reflected
on the glass. Colours gather there, sunrise and twilight, cloud shadows
and cloud reflections, the pewter dullness of gathering rain, the blue,
burning splendour of space swept free of every cloud. Light transfixes
ocean, and some warmth steals in with the light, but the waves that
glint in the sun are still a tingling cold.
Now do insects inherit the warm earth. When a sluggish wind blows from
the marsh on a hot day, the dunes can be tropical. The sand quivers
with insect lives. On such days, “greenheads,” _Tabanus costalis_,
stab and buzz, sand gnats or “no-see-ums” gather in myriads on the
sun-drenched south wall of the house, “flatiron flies” and minor
unknowns swarm to the attack. One must remain indoors or take a
precarious refuge at the ocean’s very edge. Thanks to the wind, the
coolness, and the spray, the lower beach is usually free of insect
bloodletters, though the bullying, poisonous Tabanid, in the mid-August
height of his season, can be a hateful nuisance. So far, however,
I have had but two of these tropical visitations. Barring an extra
allowance of greenheads, the dunes are probably quite as habitable
as any stretch of outermost beach. The wind, moreover, saves me from
mosquitoes.
Ants have appeared, and the upper beach is pitted with their hills; I
watch the tiny, red-brown creatures running in and out of buried weed.
Just outside each hole, the fine sand is all delicately ascrawl with
the small, endless comings and goings. The whole upper beach, indeed,
has become a plain of intense and minute life; there are tunnels and
doors and pitways everywhere. The dune locusts that were so small in
June have grown large and learned to make a sound. All up and down the
dunes, sometimes swept seaward out of their course by the west wind, go
various butterflies. When I turn up driftwood in the dunes, or walk the
wheel ruts in the meadows, crickets race off into the grass.
On the dunes, in open places near thin grass, I find the deep,
finger-round mine shafts of the dune spider. A foot below, in the
cooler sand, lives the black female; dig her up, and you will find a
hairy, spidery ball. During the summer months the lady does not leave
her cave, but in early autumn she revisits the world and scuttles
through the dune grass, black, fast, and formidable. The smaller,
sand-coloured male runs about everywhere. I saw one on the beach
the other night, running along in cloudy moonlight, and mistook him
at first for a small crab. Later the same night, I found a tiny,
sand-coloured dune toad at the very brim of the surf, and wondered if
an appetite for beach fleas had led him there.
“June bugs,” _Lachnosterna arcuata_, strike my screens with a formidable
boom and linger there formidably buzzing; let me but open the door,
and half a dozen are tilting at my table lamp and falling stunned upon
the cloth. On mounded slopes of sand, solitary black wasps scratch
themselves out a cave; across my paths move the shadows of giant dragon
flies.
The straggling beach peas of the region are in bloom; the west wind
blows the grass and rushes out to the rippled levels of a level sea;
heat clouds hang motionless on the land horizon, their lower rims lost
in the general haze; the great sun overflows; the year burns on.