It was one of those perfect days which so rarely come to England. The first day of June. The sun was golden, the Channel deepest sapphire, the air drowsy with bee hum and bird song. The Dorset littoral was a rolling quilt of mustard and dun over which cuckoos wheeled and emitted their plaintive cries, searching for foster nests.

Richard Blade, sunning himself in the skimpiest of breech cloths, lay on his hard flat belly and squinted over the corundum waves that came lazily in, wearing flecks of lace at their throats. Far out, under a canopy of brown smoke, a coaster was making for the Thames and London. Blade, who had read poetry at Oxford and promptly forgotten most of it, found some of Masefield's popping unbidden into his mind.

… dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack … with a cargo of ivory, and apes and peacocks, sandalwood and cedarwood acrd sweet white wine…

No matter that the poet had not written it so-Blade's version better fitted the day. He turned over and closed his.eyes, peering into the red lagoon at the dark shadow play. He drowsed, relaxing, watching the sciomachy behind his eyelids, the amorphous and fluid Rorschach blots that melded and intersticed and-and blotted out the sun? His face was in full shadow now although there were no clouds in the sky. A trickle of sand, hourglass slow, bounced off hig muscled belly like a miniature avalanche.

He had not heard her approach.

Blade's first impression, when he opened his eyes and stared up into hers, was of green glacial ice. Not so much a coldness as a reserve, narrowed at him in a mix of curiosity and indifference. From a small brown fist she continued to pour sand on his stomach. Blade said nothing.

«They told me in the village that this cove is usually deserted at this time. I came here because I wanted to be alone. Now I find a huge creature like you taking up practically all of it.»