But what made the chief delight of the spot, closed in by rocks
from the open sands, was the multitude of fairy rivers that flowed across
it to the sea. The gladness these streams gave me I cannot communicate. The
tide had filled thousands of hollows in the breakwater, hundreds of cracked
basins in the rocks, huge sponges of sand; from all of which--from cranny
and crack, and oozing sponge--the water flowed in restricted haste back,
back to the sea, tumbling in tiny cataracts down the faces of the rocks,
bubbling from their roots as from wells, gathering in tanks of sand, and
overflowing in broad shallow streams, curving and sweeping in their sandy
channels, just like, the great rivers of a continent;--here spreading into
smooth silent lakes and reaches, here babbling along in ripples and waves
innumerable--flowing, flowing, to lose their small beings in the same ocean
that met on the other side the waters of the Mississippi, the Orinoco, the
Amazon. All their channels were of golden sand, and the golden sunlight
was above and through and in them all: gold and gold met, with the waters
between.
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