The surf lay bare those stones as, last week, a swell of long periodicity arrived along the south shore, generated by a storm somewhere alee of the northern Antarctic, sweeping up towards Tahiti and hanging a sharp left to New Zealand and the antipodes.

We felt the reverberations of that distant meteorological upset in the form of wave pulses, each cycle a beat of 7, energy pushing aside and asunder sand, revealing those smoothened globules of lava and coral that, in the aggregate, is an instrument

of sound and organic music, its vibrations felt in the viscera, along the bottoms of one’s feet, the febrile palms of one’s hands. It is a glorious noise, a resonant revelation: that distant winds have crafted all of this through time, repetition, subtlety, and phenomenal, planetary scale.