CHAPTER 5: Two Moon Beach and High Black Water
I came to the beach on the third afternoon of following the top of the cliff along the gorge through an endless forest. I shucked my bedroll and plunked myself down. The sand was warm.
"Boring," I said aloud. "I said this place is boring."
Even the gopher was silent. "The only thing more boring than nuthing but trees is nuthin' but sand. Great!" Absently I sifted some of the sand through my fingers. It was warm and coarse. There appeared to be only a thin layer of sand, with rock only a few inches below the surface. I lay back, letting the soft warmth soothe my troubled mind.
"Strange sorta place ain't it?" Sport wasn't going to waste this opportunity.
Come to think of it, he was right. I had come about a hundred meters down a slight grade through coarse grass since breaking out of the edge of the woods, and then across about thirty meters of the coarse sand before sitting down. To my left, no more than fifty meters, a sheer cliff dropped off to the river raging a full hundred meters below. I knew, because I had been following that river for more than a week now. Besides, I could hear it surging through that deep gorge. The really strange thing was that from this perspective it appeared that the world ended here. About a hundred meters in front of me the beach ended and beyond that, nothing... no sea, no river, no horizon... nothing.
I stood up and started forward. About half way to the end of the world I could see that I was wrong. There was a horizon out there. Way out there... and way down there. Apparently the beach ended in a cliff that stretched as far in either direction as my unaided eyes could see, broken only by a crease from the gorge created by my river. And that explained the depth of the river gorge. I lay down and crawled the last few meters to the end of the beach. I inched forward on my belly and peered down at the surf a hundred meters below me where the sea surged against the glassy face of a concave cliff. I scuttled quickly backwards. I had just discovered another fact to add to my inventory of things I did know. I suffered from vertigo.
Standing up on suddenly weak legs, I walked back to where I had abandoned my pack. I cast about looking for driftwood to build a fire with. There was none.
Of course there was none. That cliff was old. As I returned to the forest's edge to gather fuel I mulled things over in my mind. That sea had cast no driftwood upon this beach. That cliff was high. Now, at last I understood the lack of animal life on this planet. As I returned to the forest to scrounge up some firewood, I considered this strange place.
Nothing had ever crawled out of that sea. This ancient beach, and evidently the entire continent, had risen above the water before amphibious life could develop. Plants, with their rougher cell walls and inverse respiration might emerge from fresh water to land, but not animals - never animals. Fresh water amphibians had to evolve from saltwater forebears. Isotonic imbalance would kill any fresh water creatures that tried it, no matter how simple the original organism. If this entire continent had elevated above the sea as long ago as the concavity of the cliff face suggested, this planet would never evolve terrestrial animal life.
I carried my firewood back to my pack, built a small fire, and did my evening chores. Supper finished, I sat back and stared into the fire. Something was nagging at me. Something about this ancient beach was wrong. And something about the sky was wrong. Just what was wrong in either instance eluded me. I couldn't put my finger on either of them. The gopher was nibbling at my brain stem again, but he didn't come out to talk.
"What's out of whack?" I worried at the thought, but it wouldn't focus. I was sure that if I just had my memory back I could identify the problem.
