Under the sea, beneath the expanse now turning green, the whirlpools and reefs were innumerable. Silently they were rending the layers of water, devouring space; but a sort of opaque paralysis enfolded them, slipped into their crevices, intruded into their wounds and kept them motionless. There, hundreds of yards down, in muted listlessness, life had its roots too. Fish swam blindly round and round, near the mouths of caverns. For them it was always night. Never did the sun set amid flaming clouds. Never did the moon shine with frozen brilliance in the centre of the darkness. Light and darkness ha intermingled below the liquid surface, and there reigned perpetually a sort of blurred glimmer, coming from nowhere and never lighting up anything.
But on land one didn’t suspect that. Standing on a sticky rock a few inches from the fringe of the sea, one could only see masses of black matter, probing into the liquid sphere. The sheet of silence was purplish-blue, moving its tiny wrinkles imperceptibly; it was undulating smoothly, swaying forward, breaking, returning, spreading out like a patch of oil, retreating a little, then advancing again, without fatigue, without end, with a sort of melancholy, mawkish, inscrutable obstinacy.
[The World Is Alive, from Fever, Le Clézio, J. M. G.]
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