The sun was grey, the sky was milky and grey, the sand was grey and down by the waterside it was dark grey. Where it was dry it was like powdered ash, and where it was wet it clung together with a stiff, burnt hardness. In the dunes it mingled with large pebbles and was gritty and grey. The pebbles were grey. The sand blew against things and into clothing where it remained, persistently irritating. The cabbage-like plants in the dunes were grey and beach was dirty.

There were peels and pieces of broken pottery in the sand. He saw discarded shells and fish bones and something that looked like a bone but not a fishbone. It was long, dun-coloured, and it rose into a rounded knob at the end. There were toothmarks pitted into the knob as if someone had chewed the gristle off. Considering it, he felt depressed. He left the filthy bone alone and went down to the water's edge.

He had come here to swim, but the sea was as grey as the beach. It moved against the sand with sullen slaps. There were knots of seaweed drifting. A line of it had been washed up along the beach. Bubbles clung there. The bubbles had a tough yellow, leathery look fierce and shellacked like aged mummies of themselves, as if they would last forever in spite of the wind which was tugging at them furiously.

A little way up the beach a girl was stabbing at the wet sand with a stick. Beyond her a group of people were sitting on the grey grit, eating. The ashes of their fire were tarnishing the sand with a scattered, dark blotch. They had a pot of boiled water between them and from it they were lifting open shells on the tips of their knives. Swiftly they sucked out the hot, dead bodies of the shellfish and flung the shells aside before they burnt their fingers.

He watched them from the edge of the sea. They sucked their fingers and blew on them to relieve the heat. This beach would have looked better, he thought, if there had been rocks to break up the water and give the place a sense of scale, wildness, but there were no rocks. The open air seemed stifling.

Peoples' shadows lay flat and plain on the ground. It offended his desire for natural mystery. This beach paid no attention to its visitors; it flung itself down, dull and naked, and didn't care who saw it lying there. It had no pride.

He turned his back on the sea and walked toward the houses that straggled across the hunched spines of the dunes. The houses crouched, dirty, with sagging ceilings and walls held together with anything at all: snapped struts, pots, newspaper, spoons. Puddles of sewerage stood in the sand, which refused to absorb them.