The sun had not yet risen. “The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it.
“Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the grey cloth became barred with thick strokes moving, one after another, beneath the surface, following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually.”
And so Virginia Woolf opens her 1931 novel The Waves, told in the dialogue and soliloquy of the characters, interrupted by authorial dawn-to-dusk weather reports.
“As they near the shore, each bar rose, heaped itself, broke and swept a thin veil of white water across the sand. The wave paused, and then drew out again, sighing like a sleeper whose breath comes and goes unconsciously.
“Gradually the dark bar on the horizon became clear as if the sediment in an old wine-bottle had sunk and left the glass green. Behind it, too, the sky cleared as if the white sediment there had sunk, or as if the arm of a woman couched beneath the horizon had raised a lamp and flat bars of white, green and yellow spread across the sky like the blades of a fan. Then she raised her lamp higher and the air seemed to become fibrous and to tear away from the green surface flickering and flaming in red and yellow fibres like the smoky fire that roars from a bonfire.”
Dawn arrives as “one haze, one incandescence which lifted the weight of the woollen grey sky and turned it to a million atoms of soft blue”.
