The Sea-Gnarlies

Something I began to write last night. It is inspired by all the photos of Brittany which I've looked at for my research, specifically of the Abbey of St. Mathieu and the Baie des Trepassés. It's probably nonsense but I find it intriguing.

THE winter wind drove grey ridges of snowy-peaked waves against the cliffs, which thousands of summers had burnished into a dark clay red, and up in a fleeting mist which scattered furling to rain even onto the downtrodden heather at their edge. In every direction the rock was seamed, into and along every seam the brine and the wind ran, and the boulders in strange Neolithic forms which stood as towers in the bereft sands at low tide were now lightless houses on water-embowered islets.

A strange sound arose on the winds as they strafed the long-untenanted shell of an abbey, curved around the pillar of the lighthouse, sought the hollows among the gorse and the grasses, and whipped into a shiver the flexible twigs of dormant oaks and sombre pines. Even the river which ran into the bay was agitated as it swelled with a sudden cargo of rainwater.

Up from the shore crept the sea-gnarlies, the gnomes of sealskin pelts and tiny eyes buried in wrinkles and mighty tiny bodies, who sleep in the crevices in the sea floor and emerge only when a submarine tension and tremor signals a commotion on the surface. Then they hunt for their food: the stray corpse of fish or lobster or other creature which lands on the shore, oysterbeds and scallops and rope-encircled posts of mussels, unwary seabirds abroad on the same errand, and even a human. When they had scaled the cliffs with their fierce fingernails and toenails they brushed through the heather with a soft furtive sound, scratching here and there at patches of grass to bare the insects in the soil, and pinching or skewering or grabbing fistfuls of the resistant prey before swallowing them with grim joviality as amuse-bouches.

Down they crept to a swathe of boulders, gambolling through the surf and diving deep to the stone hidden by the winter tides, to pry the barnacles with their teeth and draw the crustacean innards into their mouths.

Through the abbey flitted the grey forms of the friars, not the ghosts of the dead friars but the ghosts of the living friars they had been eight hundred years since and as the eerie phantoms of their dream selves: amoral, unperceptive, yet arrested at moments into consciousness and intelligence. They copied Latin tales onto invisible scrolls, relived bawdy encounters, vituperated their head abbot and the bishop or some papal bull from Rome which had long since sunk into obscurity, complained about the rude and uncivilized folk among whom they unwillingly lived, cultivated vegetables or flowers or orchards which had long since withered and crumbled, or fought supernatural battles with angels and demons, dragons and selkies, and the wolves and boars and robbers which haunted the environs of the abbey or the regions of France from which they had once come.

In the nineteenth-century lighthouse which stood rooted in the land of the abbey but rose from it like a thriving sapling from a moribund trunk, the keepers’ dream selves, too, held vigils, each unaware of the other. And it was a peculiar contrast to see the automated beacon turning, beaming, flashing, turning, beaming, and flashing, as the weather station recorded the wind speeds and temperature and air pressure of its own accord, while the former tenants in their old-fashioned manner and dress employed antiquated invisible devices and measurements recorded in invisible ledgers, or sent radio messages to people who did not exist, and perceived and described eerily enough the weather conditions as they were in actuality. These mundane dreams alternated, too, with dreams of war, shipboard travails, imaginary fiends and adventures, and distant families and loves.

Oldest of all, the vague white shapes of Neolithic men and women mingled with the similar weak figures of tree-spirits and the solid stony outlines of Roman soldiers, who were for the most part not at ease and some of whom bore the bloody marks of axes and celts and spears on their persons. These were oddly pragmatic and therefore enacted the scenes of daily cooking, warfare, sailing, grave ceremonies around tumuli and dolmens, and gatherings among parades of stones across the heath, and still at times the Romans dreamed of their origins in the Mediterranean basin, and faintest wisps of almond trees, dolphins, the splashing of the wine-dark sea against a brighter shore, or the sirocco even manifested themselves in this adverse northern climate.

[. . .]

The sea-gnarlies were by no means, however, the only living beings abroad, even disregarding the gulls, cormorants, porpoises, and other animals. There were the Liths, boulder trolls who resembled the Romans in their grey girth but were far less anthropoid in form; the Liths sipped riverwater and ate sand from the shore and, having no need of alternative nourishment, they were singularly unaggressive and they rarely spoke so as to be heard except by their kinsmen. These Liths, in fact, were lumbering down to the shore then, leaving no prints in the sand as they waded through, for it settled again at once.