The End Of October

It is the first south-westerly gale of the autumn.  Its violence is increasing every minute, although the rain has ceased for awhile.  For weeks sky and sea have been beautiful, but they have been tame.  Now for some unknown reason there is a complete change, and all the strength of nature is awake.  It is refreshing to be once more brought face to face with her tremendous power, and to be reminded of the mystery of its going and coming.  It is soothing to feel so directly that man, notwithstanding his science and pretentions, his subjugation of steam and electricity, is as nothing compared with his Creator.  The air has a freshness and odour about it to which we have long been strangers.  It has been dry, and loaded with fine dust, but now it is deliciously wet and clean.  The wind during the summer has changed lightly through all the points of the compass, but it has never brought any scent save that of the land, nothing from a distance.  Now it is charged with messages from the ocean.

The sky is not uniformly overcast, but is covered with long horizontal folds of cloud, very dark below and a little lighter where they turn up one into the other.  They are incessantly modified by the storm, and fragments are torn away from them which sweep overhead.  The sea, looked at from the height, shows white edges almost to the horizon, and although the waves at a distance cannot be distinguished, the tossing of a solitary vessel labouring to get round the point for shelter shows how vast they are.  The prevailing colour of the water is greyish-green, passing into deep-blue, and perpetually shifting in tint.  A quarter of a mile away the breakers begin, and spread themselves in a white sheet to the land.

A couple of gulls rise from the base of the cliffs to a height of about a hundred feet above them.  They turn their heads to the south-west, and hover like hawks, but without any visible movement of their wings.  They are followed by two more, who also poise themselves in the same way.  Presently all four mount higher, and again face the tempest.  They do not appear to defy it, nor even to exert themselves in resisting it.  What to us below is fierce opposition is to them a support and delight.  How these wonderful birds are able to accomplish this feat no mathematician can tell us.  After remaining stationary a few minutes, they wheel round, once more ascend, and then without any effort go off to sea directly in the teeth of the hurricane.