After we had reached the foot of the pyramid and turned to mingle with the terrified rabble that surged and flowed through the courtyard of the temple, bearing away the dead and wounded as the sea at flood reclaims its waste and wreckage, a noise like thunder caught my ear.

I kicked with my feet for a foothold, but I was pulled back, my hands torn from the rocks as the sea reclaimed me.

In the northern part of the Aquitanian Basin, the Cenomanian sea reclaimed nearly the same areas that had been occupied by the Jurassic sea; in the east, however, it only reached the line Brive-Cahors-Agen-Muret-Carcassonne.

"Over time, the sea will reclaim it, bit by bit," he said.

Watching the sea reclaim its bed for the night, I'm amazed that, despite the sea crashing in and out of this small bay twice a day for over 270 years, only one of those markers is unaccounted for.

Only now the sea was reclaiming that too, as its irregular, collapsing granite buttresses showed.

Fifteen . . . black brackish water in the bottom because this whole place was nothing more than a wooded marsh that eventually the sea would erode and reclaim.

'The sea is reclaiming Droy Wood,' the man shrieked.

Some 400 feet directly below, waves crashed against the rust-red, stratified rock, a reminder that the sea had reclaimed half the land created by the eruption.