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rhythms of arm over arm slow, and break. There is no hurry now. As the afternoon wears on and we continue our watch (time has its verticals too) we are witness to a curious and repeated ritual. Two boys — they are indistinguishable — dive and surface, chase each other, grapple and sink: arms/legs entangled, released, they shoot out in opposite directions like dolphins gliding. Then are drawn back, grapple again, roll, go under together, rise, bodies still locked in what can only be described as a sensual embrace. In fact the entire ritual — tirelessly, effortlessly repeated — appears to be a kind of foreplay, albeit practised with animal innocence. Yet surely this is another of our illusions, for these are mere boys and their love is as much with the water as one another. And the game is never consummated but played over and over: the chase, the grappling, the sudden sinking, space of water all around as they break apart smoothly, whole again, reassured by their own weightlessness. Dolphins in their lawful element. Odd, you may think, how we rehearse, over and over, these acts for a drama we have not yet seen, whose plot is as inscrutable as the deep currents pulling the waves a way they are not going.

      Then, as if another tumbler has dropped somewhere inside, both boys abruptly end their play (more properly their prologue). Sun, wind, and waves low now. They float motionless, shoreward, all will abandoned. Bodies flattened, merge with the surface. Arms held close to the side, palms out, like rudimentary fins. The water takes them wave over wave to the dry shore. No movement. Flesh shuddering in the strange air. Then hands, then feet recognize the beach beneath; the bodies lift, wobble, crawl, uncertain the first few dangerous feet, till the boldest wave no longer washes over them.

      Beyond the eye’s reach (theirs, not ours) the dunes welcome the long shadows, hold the cool wind poised in the bowls of their upturned mouths. The same wind these boys, petrified now upon the sand, feel blowing over their shoulders, blowing eastward the ceaseless waves, blowing the far-off poplar leaves one way, opening through them the secret boy-paths that wind through the dunes, become the first dusty roads leading down into the distant village below.

      The place, the point where our story begins, and ends.