“The sea cannot be described,” wrote Chekhov; “I once read in a child’s copy-book an essay on the sea, four words and a full stop—­’The sea is large’—­and whenever I attempt a description, I am obliged to confess that I can do no better than the child.”  The fact is, the sea describes us; that is why we cannot describe it.  It is, itself, language and metaphor for the telling of our own longings and our own mysteries.  In the sound of the waves is only the song of man’s life; in the endless variety of its appearance only the story of our own mystery.

Thus the sea is all things.  They call this the Black Sea, and at evening when the clouds in the high heaven are reflected in it, it is indeed black.  But it should be called the many-coloured, for indeed it is all colours.  In the full heat of noon, as I write, it is white; it is covered with half-visible vapour through which a greenness is lost in pallor.  The horizon is the black line of a broken arc.  Other days it is blue as a great ripe plum, and the horizon is faint-pink, like down.  On cloudy afternoons it is grey with unmingled sorrow; in early morning it is joyous as a young child.  I have seen it from a distance piled up to the sky like a wall of hard sapphire.  I have seen it near at hand faint away from the shore, colourless, lifeless, in the heart-searching of its ebb tide.  It is all things, at all times, and to all persons.

II

At Dzhugba the sea was quiet as a little lake; at Dagomise it was many-crested and thundering in the majesty of storm.  At Gudaout the sun rose over it as it might have done on the first morning of the world.

Every dawning I bathed, and each bathing was as a new baptism.  And in multifarious places it was given to me to bathe; at Dzhugba, where the sun shone fiercely on green water and the dark seaweed washed to and fro on the rocks; at Olginka, the quietest little bay imaginable, where the sea was so clear that one could count the stones below it, the rippling water so crystalline that it tempted one to stoop down and drink—­a dainty spot—­even the stones, on long curves of the shore, seemed to have been nicely arranged by the sea the night before, and far as I swam out to sea I saw the bottom as through glass.

How different at Dagomise!  All night long it had thundered.  I slept under a wooden bridge that spanned a dried-up river.  The lightning played all about me, the rain roared, the thunder crashed overhead.  The storm passed, but as the thunder died away from the sky, it broke out from the sea and roared deafeningly all around.  I could not bathe, for the sea was tremendous.  A grand sight presented itself at dawn, the sea foaming forwards in thousands of billows.  Along five miles of seashore the white horses galloped forward against the rocks, as if the whole sea were an army arrayed against the land.  How the white pennons flew!

Later in the morning I undressed, and sitting in moderate safety on a shelf of rock, let the spent billows rush over me.  The waves rushed up the steep beach like tigers for their prey, their eyes turned away from mine, but full of cruelty and anger.  I was, deep in myself, afear’d.