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⇒ Cover ⇒ Preface ⇒ Introduction ⇒ The visit ⇒ Weymouth map c.1930 ⇒ Portland map c.1930 ⇒ Works quoted ⇒ Postface |
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A visit to Weymouth with John Cowper Powys [ ⇒ continue... ] |
I am an animal, a vegetable, a reptile, a man—a lonely, isolated mind, confronting its universe. |
THE ROCK-POOL |
 ... as he stood here now, it seemed to Magnus as if it were he, and not his Love, who had passed down ... to a world from which something—though its loss might leave other consolations—had been taken away, that could never—no! not even by a miracle—be given back. Turning southward now, he moved hurriedly along the crest of the pebbled ridge till he reached the chaotic confusion of tumbled, jagged, slippery sea-rocks that lie along the base of the westerly cliffs of Portland. He climbed over a few of these until, feeling exhausted, he sank down on a rough limestone slab, overgrown with sharp indented rock-shells and gazed down into a rock-pool. Here living seaweeds, their lovely, light-floating filaments expanding in the swaying tide, revealed, as they stirred, all manner of rich, strange shells lying at the pool's bottom. (...) Here, in this enchanted fissure, he could see purple and amber-coloured sea-anemones, their living, waving antennae-like tendrils swaying gently, as the tide swell took them. And tiny, greenish fish with sharply extended dorsal fins darted to and fro across the waving petals of those plants that were more than plants! But it was at the motionless shells at the bottom that he now gazed with his strongest sense of the past. |
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