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Sea-mews and cormorants flew about him restlessly, as if anxious to warn him of his danger. The ship was rapidly growing less. There was no foam around the rock where he sat; no wave beat against its granite sides. The water rose peacefully. It was nearly level with Gilliatt's shoulders. The birds were hovering about him, uttering short cries. Only his head was now visible.
Familiar with that element from childhood, they skimmed over its surface with the lightness and rapidity of sea-mews, and swarmed up the sides of the galley. A vigorous defence might yet have saved the vessel; but the heroic days of Venice were long past the race of men who had so long maintained the supremacy of the republic in all the Italian seas, was now extinct.
By the seashore lived fishermen; but she could not get so far, she was so ill. The great white sea-mews flew over her head, and screamed as the crows and daws screamed at home in the garden of the manor house. The birds flew quite close to her, and at last it seemed to her as if they became black as crows, and then all was night before her eyes.
Over there oh, he felt as though he would die for joy, so great was the cruel emotion that wrung his heart! over there, almost at the top of the Needle of Etretat, a little below the extreme point round which the sea-mews fluttered, a thread of smoke came filtering through a crevice, as though from an invisible chimney, a thread of smoke rose in slow spirals in the calm air of the twilight.
Curlews and sandpipers whistled on the shore, complaining sea-mews sailed overhead, and the low-lying skerries outside were swarming with "skarts" and other frequenters of the wild north. "Oh, what a funny face!" exclaimed Junkie, as a great seal rose head and shoulders out of the sea, not fifty yards off, to look at them. Its observations induced it to sink promptly.
Popilia too, a city once also of some importance, is now the almost deserted island of Poveglia which we pass just after leaving Malamocco, as we steam along that splendid wide high-way direct to Venice between the mud-flats and the sea-mews and those countless groups of piles marking the channel, which always resemble bunches of giant asparagus and sometimes seem to be little companies of drowning people who have sworn to die together.
He did not understand anything beyond his environment; he felt only unconsciously. At last it seems to him that the heavens, the water, his rock, the tower, the golden sand-banks, and the swollen sails, the sea-mews, the ebb and flow of the tide, all form a mighty unity, one enormous mysterious soul; that he is sinking in that mystery, and feels that soul which lives and lulls itself.
Time passed, and confirmed him in this conviction. The old man grew accustomed to his tower, to the lantern, to the rock, to the sand-bars, to solitude. He grew accustomed also to the sea-mews which hatched in the crevices of the rock, and in the evening held meetings on the roof of the light- house.
Empires may rise and may fall, dynasties may perish, great wars may come and go, but, heedless of it all, those two shall embrace each other for ever and aye, in their lonely shrine by the side of the sounding ocean. I sometimes have thought that their spirits flit like shadowy sea-mews over the wild waters of the bay.
Everything in nature seemed silent and motionless, with the exception of the sea-mews that wheeled round the summits of the cliffs or dived into the glassy sea. All these things were noted and appreciated in various degrees by the members of the party who hastened towards Saint Margaret's Bay, but none of them commented much on the scenery.
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