Eventually he got up the energy and coordination to move. Everything still seemed to be working-no bones broken that he could see or feel right now. Cautiously he stood up. For a moment his head swam, and he nearly lost his balance. But after that, he knew he would be able to stay on his feet. So he stretched, to get a few more of the aches out of his muscles and joints, then looked around him.

Now he knew why he had been hearing a roaring in his ears. He was standing on a rocky beach by the ocean. Great blue-green waves were roaring in onto the beach and breaking in clouds of foam and spray. They were breaking hard enough to move rocks the size of a man and breaking with a terrible, continuous grinding noise. A long reef of high-piled rocks ran out into the sea, off to Blade's right. The incoming surf broke in high rainbows of spray over a mound of black rocks at the far end, a good quarter of a mile away.

Blade looked back at the shore and along the beach. He didn't like what he saw. The beach lay at the bottom of a semicircle of high, weathered rock cliffs nearly half a mile long. At the foot of the cliffs was thirty or forty feet of rocky slope. Blade realized that he must have struck near the top of that slope and rolled down. Above the slope the cliff shot vertically nearly two hundred feet against the blue sky. Blade could see flowering trees and bushes tossing in the sea wind on top of the cliff. At least the land was not going to be totally barren and inhospitable-if he could ever get to it.

That was going to be the problem-getting off this beach and out of this cove to somewhere more habitable. He could try to climb two hundred feet of crumbling rock in his present battered condition, with only toes and fingers for climbing aids.