"If you get something to eat," he said, "I'll run you down to Glengariff
siding till the goods comes along. It's cooler there than here, you see."
I got food and drink from the Greeks who sell all things at a price, and
the engine trotted us a couple of miles up the line to a bay of drifted
sand and a plank-platform half buried in sand not a hundred yards from the
edge of the surf. Moulded dunes, whiter than any snow, rolled far inland
up a brown and purple valley of splintered rocks and dry scrub. A crowd of
Malays hauled at a net beside two blue and green boats on the beach; a
picnic party danced and shouted barefoot where a tiny river trickled
across the flat, and a circle of dry hills, whose feet were set in sands
of silver, locked us in against a seven-coloured sea. At either horn of
the bay the railway line, cut just above high water-mark, ran round a
shoulder of piled rocks, and disappeared.
"You see there's always a breeze here," said Hooper, opening the door as
the engine left us in the siding on the sand, and the strong south-easter
buffeting under Elsie's Peak dusted sand into our tickey beer. Presently
he sat down to a file full of spiked documents. He had returned from a
long trip up-country, where he had been reporting on damaged rolling-
stock, as far away as Rhodesia. The weight of the bland wind on my
eyelids; the song of it under the car roof, and high up among the rocks;
the drift of fine grains chasing each other musically ashore; the tramp of
the surf; the voices of the picnickers; the rustle of Hooper's file, and
the presence of the assured sun, joined with the beer to cast me into
magical slumber.
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