The sea had risen without warning, a white delirium of spray and roar. It came not in waves but in convulsions, as if the element itself were sick of containment and meant to unmake its boundaries. The wind pressed the foam flat, then tore it upward again, shredding it into a kind of blizzard. Somewhere in that confusion I thought I saw a figure.
It was no more than a dark suggestion in the cataract, a shifting form that seemed to heave forward and be dragged back in the same instant. Each time the sea struck, the human form appeared to resist; each time it fell away, the shape dissolved into whiteness. I could not be certain there was anyone there at all. Still, the mind insists on pattern - a head, an arm flung upward, a body twisted in the labour of survival.
I stood on the shingle, trying to avoid being overbalanced by the force of the waves, salt burning my lips, waiting for the form to resolve itself into fact. But the sea gave me nothing. The longer I watched, the more it seemed the apparition was not in the surf but in myself - a man conjured by exhaustion, guilt, memory. The old fear that the world was alive and would not have him.
When at last the tide receded, it left the beach furrowed and gleaming, the foam thinning into nothing. The figure was gone, if it had ever been. Yet I knew that part of me had been smashed out by the sea, had been taken - like a drowned man never found - the part of me that still believed there might be meaning in the tumult, a face in the water, a will behind the wave.
(After William Golding.)
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