You are about to read a short story called The Wave by Irish writer Liam O’Flaherty. This story is unusual because there are no humans in it. Instead, the author describes a wave crashing into a cliff.
You should read this story at least twice. 1. On the first reading try to visualise (see) the battle between the wave and the cliff.
2. On the second reading, underline or take notes of the words ‘wave’ and ‘cliff’ as you read. What effect does the author’s repeated use of these words have on his description of the scene?
THE WAVE by Liam O'Flaherty
6
The cliff was two hundred feet high. It sloped outwards from its grassy summit, along ten feet of brown gravel, down one hundred and seventy feet of grey limestone, giant slabs piled horizontally with large slits between the slabs where sea-birds nested. The outward slope came to a round point twenty feet from the base and there the cliff sank inwards, making a dark cavern along the cliff’s face into the bowels of the earth. At the mouth, the cavern was twenty feet high and at the rear its roof touched its floor, a flat rock that stretched from the base of the cliff to the sea. The cavern had a black-slate roof and at the rear there was a large streak of yellow gravel. The cliff was semi-circular. And at each corner a black jagged reef jutted from its base out into the sea. Between the reefs there was a little cove. But the sea did not reach to the semicircle of the cliff. Only its waves swept up from the deep over the flat rock to the cliff. The sea had eaten up the part of the cliff that rested on that semicircle of flat rock, during thousands of years of battle. It was nearly high tide. But the sea moved so violently that the two reefs bared with each receding wave until they seemed
