The chamber behind the beach

An original literary non-fiction-style account of visiting a sea cave with an organised coastal walking group.

The entrance looked like a torn pocket in the cliff. We had been told that the route would take us only a short distance inside, and our guide stopped us at a marked rope. Beyond it, darkness continued without offering any useful impression of its size. The beach behind us remained painfully bright.

Inside the permitted space, the air felt cool against my forehead. Water moved somewhere out of sight. A drop struck a shallow pool with a sound so definite that I turned towards it. Another answered from a different direction. The cave seemed to contain several clocks, none of them interested in agreeing.

The guide lifted her lamp towards the wall. A curved band of rock emerged from the dark, followed by a wet seam which held the light after the lamp had moved on. Our shadows climbed above us and lost their heads in the uneven roof. Someone near the rope laughed quietly. The laugh returned enlarged, making its owner look briefly embarrassed by the amount of room it had occupied.

I stood still and watched the entrance. People on the beach crossed it as small sharp figures, each visible for a moment before disappearing behind the cliff’s edge. Inside, even a raised hand seemed to need permission from the dark before its shape could be understood.

When we went out, the sound of the beach spread around us again: conversation, loose stones under shoes, a gull somewhere above the path. I turned back. The cave had become the same narrow opening in the cliff. Nothing in its appearance explained how completely it had altered the scale of a laugh.

How does the writer present the atmosphere inside the cave?