There are things we have forgotten on the sea bed, lying as deep beneath the waves as the sky is high above. Sunken treasure, little keepsakes, the debris of time and travel, the precious and the useless sleep together among the silt. Some, eaten away by time, decay; others, their glitter almost permanent, keep a hint of beauty still.
Like this day, a day among so many, on a long haul and a weary passage, wind from the north-west drove a small ship before it. It ran with the gale’s edge until there was no more sea. Land staked a claim, then thrust it all away again, out into the broad gutters of the crashing swell.
The ship heeled and foundered not a mile from shore and what it carried was lost, like so many petty cargoes, falling, slowly glinting, fading in the deep, down in a watery spiral to meet the waving weed. Such treacherous water, land so close.
When there was the slightest hope of morning, when the waves were laid over on their backs, wreckage seemed to sleep amongst them: the wood-shards, the ropes and windlass handles. Face-down bodies, stared into their resting-place of mud and sand. Beneath them, far away, invisible to what eyes they still possessed, the sea-floor waited, littered with the heavy cargoes of their voyage.
There will be other wrecks, and other ships will come to trawl the places where wrecks and seabed things belong. A single rope run into the waves will anchor the surface to the depths. At one end, a marker buoy will turn what was lost to treasure once again; on the ocean bed, half under sand, as dull as stone, a few shining things will cling like limpets on this strand of hope.
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