Not then, for the wise man, is Biarritz a place to see and to love:
but in the winter, when a little knot of quiet pleasant English hold
the place against all comers, and wander, undisturbed by fashion,
about the quaint little rocks and caves and natural bridges--and
watch tumbling into the sea, before the Biscayan surges, the trim
walks and summer-houses, which were erected by the municipality in
honour of the Empress and her suite. Yearly they tumble in, and
yearly are renewed, as the soft greensand strata are graven away, and
what must have been once a long promontory becomes a group of
fantastic pierced rocks, exactly like those which are immortalized
upon the willow-pattern plates.
Owing to this rapid destruction, the rocks of Biarritz are very
barren in sea-beasts and sea-weeds. But there is one remarkable
exception, where the pools worn in a hard limestone are filled with
what seem at first sight beds of china-asters, of all loveliest
colours--primrose, sea-green, dove, purple, crimson, pink, ash-grey.
They are all prickly sea-eggs (presumably the Echinus lividus, which
is found in similar places in the west of Ireland), each buried for
life in a cup-shaped hole which he has excavated in the rock, and
shut in by an overhanging lip of living lime--seemingly a Nullipore
coralline.
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