[Illustration: BERRY HEAD.]
Upon this seaward-facing headland the great cliffs slope outward like
the sides of an old "three-decker." They bulge upon the sea, and the
flower-clad scales of the limestone are full of lustrous light and
colour, shining radiantly upon the still tide that flows at their feet.
For, on this breathless August day, the very sea is weary; not a ripple
of foam marks juncture of rock and water.
The cliffs are spattered with green, where scurvy-grass and samphire,
thrift and stonecrop find foothold in every cleft; but the flowers are
nearly gone; the rare, white rock rose which haunts these crags has shed
her last petal and the little cathartic flax and centaury; the snowy
dropwort, storks-bill and carline thistles have all been scorched away
by days of sunshine and dewless nights. Only the sea lavender still
brushes the great, glaring planes of stone with cool colour, and a wild
mallow lolls here and there out of a crevice.
By the coastguard path holiday folk tramp with hot faces, but, save for
the gulls, there is little sound or movement, for land and sea are
swooning in the heavy noontide hour. The birds are everywhere--cresting
the finials of the rocks, swooping over the sea, busy teaching the
little grey "squabs" to use their wings and trust the air. Now and then
a coney thrusts his ears from a burrow, likes not the heat, and pops
back again to his cool, dark parlour. Brown hawks hang above the brown
sward. Life seems to be retreating before the pitiless sun, yet the
sear, scorched grasses will be green again in a few weeks when the
cisterns of the autumn rains open upon them. Already tiny, blue _scilla
autumnalis_ is pressing her head through the turf.
Islets lie off-shore, so full of light that they glow like bubbles blown
of air and seem to float on the surface of the sea. Their shadows fall
in delicious purple on the aquamarine waters and warm hues percolate
their ragged, silver faces, while the gulls cluster in myriads upon
them, and, black and silent among the noisy sea-fowl, stand dusky
cormorants with long necks lifted. Like pale blue silk, shot and
streamed over with pure light, the Channel rises to the mists of the
horizon. Light penetrates air and water and earth, so that the weight of
land and water are lifted off them and lost; indeed the scene appears to
be composed of imponderable hazes and vapours merging into each other;
it is wrought in planes of light--a gorgeous, unsubstantial illumination
as though the clouds were come to earth. The eternal melody of the gulls
pierces the picture with sound, hard and metallic, until their din and
racket seem of heavier substance and reality than the mighty cliffs and
sea from which it pours. Yet the birds themselves, in their floatings
and their wheelings, are lighter than feathers. They make the only
movement save for fisher craft with tan-red sails now streaming in line
round the Head to sea. For the Scruff they are bound--a great, sandy
bottom where sole and turbot dwell ten sea-miles off-shore.
Inland gleam cornfields of heavy grain ripe for harvest--pale yellow of
oats and golden brown of wheat, where the poppies stir with the gipsy
rose; and flung up upon the cliff-edge rise lofty ramparts, ribbed with
granite and bored by portholes for cannon. A modern gun a league out at
sea would crumble these masonries like sponge-cake; but they were lifted
in haste a hundred years ago, when England quaked at the threatened
advent of "Boney," whose ordnance could not have destroyed them. The
great fortresses were piled by many thousands of busy hands, yet time
sped quicker than the engineers, and before the forts were completed,
Napoleon, from the deck of the _Bellerophon_ in the bay beneath, had
looked his last on Europe.
Still the unfinished work sprawls over the cliffs, and whence cannon
were meant to stare, now thrust the blackberry, brier and eagle-fern
through the embrasures, and stunted black-thorns and white-thorns shine
green against the grey.
One clambers among them to seek the gift of a patch of shade, and
wonders what the first Napoleon would have thought of the hydroplane
purring out to sea half a mile overhead.