Waterworn

waterworn stones

In many parts of the island the bottoms of the valleys are covered in an extraordinary manner by myriads of great loose angular fragments of the quartz rock, forming “streams of stones.” […] The blocks are not waterworn, their angles being only a little blunted […]

The cliffs were water-worn, as if they had been gnawed for thousands of years by hungry waves.

They ate in silence, sitting on the grass in the shade of the big tree where Billy Slim’s father had kept his hotel, where the naughty girls came to work as barmaids, where the bedrooms worked day and night and where small bags of water-worn gold once passed across the bar in payment for drinks and other recreations.

He has seen their lights around the ship at night, the green glow of their underwater torches, and he imagines them hovering in the water-worn doorways, their mouths red with the flesh of men, their wrists braceleted in seaweed, singing, weaving moonbeams into their hair.