Maise the Looc

The sand is fine and hard at Sellick's Beach. You can drive your car on to it. Happily not many people had. It was Friday lunchtime and Pliny and Nostradamus had stopped at Sellick's for lunch and a look around. Let us say, it wasn't quite lunchtime. They left their car at the clifftop and walked across the road, over a new bridge built over a new wetland pond and followed the new bicycle path along the clifftop, past the new grandiose houses built on dusty, stony, treeless land. They grumbled to each other about the folly of human greed.

Returning by way of the beach they were captivated by the view of the cliffs they were now walking towards. They bought a pie and a pasty at the post office/deli, and ate their lunch under a wooden shelter overlooking the beach. From there the beach was so compellingly beautiful they decided to go for a longer walk south towards the reef and the fantastical cliffs.

They walked down the car ramp and across the hard sand to the edge of the sea. The sea was flat, transparent, warm. Tiny waves dumped waterfalls of bubbles that spread like lace over the clean hard sand. Pliny and Nostradamus dragged their feet in the shallows for a while then diverged to avoid the fishing lines of a man sitting in his car.

The cliffs to their right were eggy yellow, and sculpted by the wind and tides into statues and hollowed out caves where people had etched their names, Tobias, Amy, Pat and Maise the Looc.
Further on, the cliffs opened up into a wide ravine with steep sides of orange, purple and brown,
guarded by two gigantic aloes, their elegant yellow flowers emerging like delicate pine trees out of massive spiky cacti.

Now they are level with the reef. They decide to walk upon it, after all they are wearing the proper sort of shoes. The reef is largely uncovered and flattened seaweeds lie spread out on the rocks. Little rock pools exemplify how they will look when the tide comes in. Crabs click their claws somewhere out of sight, warning other crabs. There is another sound, of glistening.

Here on the reef Pliny and Nostradmus sit and look at the cliffs. which are still quarter of an hour's walk away. The colours are muted due to an uncharacteristic haze in the air, possibly from the bushfires in Victoria. If anything this makes them even more beautiful. They are ironstone red, violet, cream and yellow, divided by lines of amazing intricacy into triangles, graphs and curves, layered, broken and rejoined. You could look at them all afternoon.

But they don't. On the way back they figure out the true meaning of Maise the Looc.
It is somewhat eroded but it once read Praise the Lord. They laugh.