Light On Waves

I think that Poul Anderson wrote somewhere that it is a good idea to appeal to at least three senses in any descriptive passage? In any case, he always does it:

"Light flew like laughter over small waves, aglint and aglimmer in a hundred shifting hues, blue, green, tawny, foam-white. They murmured and chuckled as they played tag with the shadows of hurrying snowy clouds. Birds wheeled, soared, swooped, swam, swung again aloft, in their thousands, gull, guillemot, cormorant, puffin, razor-bill, curlew, kittiwake, skua, fulmar. Their cries brought alive a breeze in which something of summer's warmth lingered on into the fall."
-Poul Anderson, Mother Of Kings (New York, 2003), Book Three, Chapter VI, p. 206.

The paragraph begins with light and ends with warmth. We must wait for the third sense but it comes. "Light...like laughter...," "...aglint and aglimmer...," "...soared, swooped, swam, swung...," "...again aloft...," "...something of summer..." and some of the birds' names are alliteration. There are three list-descriptions: colors; birds' movements; birds. The birds' cries provide sound but we have already had murmuring, chuckling waves.

We remember other descriptive passages featuring moving cloud shadows and there may be a further resonance. In Anderson's Time Patrol series, changeable wave patterns at sea are a metaphor for the quantum randomness that can change the course of temporal events. Here, we are in a single historical period but we might also remember the Patrol that guards history.