The salt pans from the path

An original literary non-fiction-style account of walking beside shallow salt pans on a coastal path.

The water had been divided into rectangles so precise that the sky seemed to have been cut up and laid on the ground. Each pan held a slightly different blue. Where a cloud crossed one rectangle, its neighbour remained blank and shining. I walked along the raised path, trying to keep my shadow from breaking the straight edge beside me.

At the far end, white heaps rose beyond the water. From a distance, they looked soft enough to sink into, like flour tipped from an enormous bag. Nearer the path, a crust had formed along a dry margin. It was rough, uneven and faintly grey. The clean whiteness I had seen from the road had acquired edges and grit.

A worker crossed between the pans pushing a small barrow. Its wheel made a thin, wavering line in the dust. For several seconds, his reflection travelled in the neighbouring water without the barrow's reflection beside it. The image looked like a man walking carefully through a room with no floor. Then the angle changed, and person, wheel and shadow fitted together again.

By late afternoon, the rectangles no longer held the sky evenly. One had become copper-coloured; another looked dark enough to have no bottom. The raised path was still narrow and perfectly solid beneath my shoes. I concentrated on that ordinary fact until the gate came into view. Behind me, the divided sky continued without noticing where I had stopped.

How does the writer use language to make the salt pans seem both orderly and difficult to judge?