Fifty miles south of Dar-el-Beida lush costal plain gives way to rocky coastline where the bones of Africa have been exposed to the relentless Atlantic rollers, like the knuckles of a fist-fighter raw and white and bleeding from relentless savagery. But today that elemental anger is gone and I find myself high up on a cliff wall in the heat of the day looking out over the impossible immenseness of the ocean, glassy, azure, sparkling. I rest a while at the top of a narrow cliff path in the shade of an ancient contorted olive tree tortured by eons of storm winds into a broken backed old man bent over and muttering curses at the unheeding sea. I take a pull at a bottle of lukewarm water and settle back to allow the music of cycads to lull me sleep.
As I do I notice a disturbance in the water below and I can make out a female form heading for shore in a slow irresistible breast stroke. There is no beach here, just the broken debris of the ancient battle of the elements, but you rise smoothly out of the water and I realise you are naked as water cascades from your smooth bronzed limbs. You chooses a place on a large flat rock that juts out from the rest of bay. Lying back you allow the unremitting sun to complete the work of drying, caressing the water from you like a lover. I imagine I can see the haze of steam envelop you. You look for all the world like a sacrifice laid out on an alter to the elements. The vast and angry ocean, now so quiet and inviting, the hellish immoderate heat of the sun and ancient granite in its uncaring stolid immovability seem to have been blended, impossibly, into this perfect specimen of female animal.
As the last of the pools of water evaporate from your warming limbs, you reach a languid hand to pull a bottle from a beach bag. Slowly, methodically you begin to reapply oil to yourself. With each stroke you shine a little brighter as if the midday sun burnishes your skin as you slide your hand over your skin. The mist that I imagined rising from you as you dried is altogether changed. I sense, I can almost see, the sweet scent beginning to rise from you. Your hands have slowed now. They have completed the work of protecting yourself from the violence of ultra-violet, but they are not still. One hand continues to flutter over the slopes of an exposed breast. I believe I can make out the tautening under the skin and the nipple rising to push into your palm. You moves to take your nipple between thumb and finger, crushing slightly and pulling at yourself until I see a tiny gasp catch in your throat. Your head rolls over in my direction and I freeze crouching, hidden above you. Your other hand slides over torso and abdomen, seeking the source of that intoxicating vapour that swirls around her an invisible miasma surrounding, engulfing. I can't stop my own hand sinking down my body in unison with yours. It is as if you have taken me and pressed my hand down between my legs. I slide myself out of my dusty shorts and immediately I am straining to greet you. I can feel myself pointing down at you below me like an arrow caught in a hunters bow, eager, desperate, desiring.
