Black, veined with purple, fiery red, or brown streaked with
white, these beautiful grottoes displayed for their visitors the
infinite variety of their shapes and colouring, their graces and their
grand caprices. There was one all of silver veined with deep red; in
another, tufts of flowers resembling periwinkles had grown on glazings
of reddish granite, and drops of water fell from the ceiling on the fine
sand with never-ceasing regularity. In the background of another grotto,
beneath a long semi-circle, a bed of polished white gravel, which the
tide no doubt turns and makes fresh every day, seemed to be waiting to
receive the body of a mermaid; but the bed is empty and has lost her
forever! Only the moist seaweed remains on which she used to stretch her
delicate nude limbs when she was tired of swimming, and on which she
reclined till daybreak, in the pale light of the moon.
The sun was setting, and the tide was coming in over the rocks that
melted in the blue evening mist, which was blanched on the level of the
ocean by the foam of the tumbling waves. In the other part of the
horizon, the sky streaked with orange stripes looked as if it had been
swept by a gale.
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