To the northeast the beach continued along as straight as a razor until its sandy edge eventually merged into the slate grey of the sea and sky in a triple vanishing point of morning drizzle, only just beginning to show the pink and golden flecks of a still uncertain sunrise, lurking just below the horizon line of Neptune’s watery realm.
In the opposite direction, the strand continued along for about a mile of open shore, bounded on the landward side by a wide and up-built concrete promenade overlooked by a seemingly endless line of dreary and desolate hotel high-rises, now all but abandoned, their black gaping windows like empty sockets in a mirthless jester’s grin.
The slightly arcing line of sand and sea terminated abruptly to the south, truncated by the great pier, demarked dimly by the haze smeared warning lights, which kept its linear bulk distinct from the yawning chasm of the night shadowed sea.
The twinkling halogen line extended perpendicularly out into the susurrating breakers before abruptly vanishing into an abyssal gloom, a limit beyond which all was shrouded in the impenetrable mists and fog choked atmosphere of the still-not-yet-dawn.
Except for one winking golden globe at the farthest edge of visibility, a trawler’s searching beam, perhaps, floating on an indistinct boundary of dark on dark, which vaguely separated the under deep from that greater depth of space above, which sheltered, beetling over. And this distant lamp so bewitched and beckoned the eye, that it was like some maritime willow-the-wisp of ancient fancy, steering the drowsy beachcomber’s weaving walk, ever so slightly towards its numinous pull, so that pant cuffs, incautiously unrolled, became suddenly salt sodden in the foaming thrusts of shushing surf, pouncing abruptly at the stillness of the shore.
Logomancy 