THE MAN ON THE BEACH
I
He lived beside a river that emptied into a great ocean. The narrow
strip of land that lay between him and the estuary was covered at high tide
by a shining film of water, at low tide with the cast-up offerings of sea and
shore. Logs yet green, and saplings washed away from inland banks,
battered fragments of wrecks and orange crates of bamboo, broken into
tiny rafts yet odorous with their lost freight, lay in long successive curves,-
- the fringes and overlappings of the sea. At high noon the shadow of a
seagull\'s wing, or a sudden flurry and gray squall of sand- pipers,
themselves but shadows, was all that broke the monotonous glare of the
level sands.