The sun had not yet risen. The sea and the sky had seemed confused, not the thousand folds of light waves similar to cracking a crumpled cloth. Little by little, as a pallor spread across the sky, a dark bar on the horizon the sea parted and the great gray cloth is raya broad lines moving under its surface, following the continuing one another in an endless rhythm.
Each wave was rising, approaching the shore, took shape, broke, and was lying on the sand a thin veil of white foam. The waves stopped, and then departed again, with the sigh of a sleeper whose breath comes and goes without his consciousness. Gradually the black bar clears the horizon: it seemed as if the lees had settled to the bottom of an old bottle, leaving them more transparent to the green walls of glass. At bottom, the sky also became translucent like a white sediment it was detached, or as if the arm of a woman lying beneath the horizon had raised a lamp strips of white, yellow, green lengthened the sky like the branches a range of platforms. Then the invisible woman raised her lamp above, the air seemed to divide into flaming red and yellow fibers, break away from the green surface in a pulsating burning smokers as the lights on top of bonfires. Fibers gradually melted into one glowing mass, the heavy gray sky coverage rose, is transmuted into a million atoms pale blue. The surface of the sea slowly became transparent with broad black lines almost disappeared under the waves and under these sparks. The arm that held the lamp raised it unhurried: a large flame appeared at last. A disk of light burned on the edge of the sky and the sea all around was not only one gold pour.
Virginia Woolf, The Waves , 1931, trans. Yourcenar
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