[Swallow by H. Rider Haggard]@TWC D-Link book
Swallow

CHAPTER II
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HOW SUZANNE FOUND RALPH KENZIE Our farm where we lived in the Transkei was not very far from the ocean; indeed, any one seated in the _kopje_ or little hill at the back of the house, from the very top of which bubbles a spring of fresh water, can see the great rollers striking the straight cliffs of the shore and spouting into the air in clouds of white foam.

Even in warm weather they spout thus, but when the south-easterly gales blow then the sight and the sound of them are terrible as they rush in from the black water one after another for days and nights together.

Then the cliffs shiver beneath their blows, and the spray flies up as though it were driven from the nostrils of a thousand whales, and is swept inland in clouds, turning the grass and the leaves of the trees black in its breath.

Woe to the ship that is caught in those breakers and ground against those rocks, for soon nothing is left of it save scattered timbers shivered as though by lightning.
One winter--it was when Suzanne was seven years old--such a south-east gale as this blew for four days, and on a certain evening after the wind had fallen, having finished my household work, I went to the top of the _kopje_ to rest and look at the sea, which was still raging terrible, taking with me Suzanne.

I had been sitting there ten minutes or more when Jan, my husband, joined me, and I wondered why he had come, for he, as brave a man as ever lived in all other things, was greatly afraid of the sea, and, indeed, of any water.


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