KS2 Reading Comprehension: The Tide Comes In

The cave mouth had looked manageable from the beach — a dark oval in the cliff face, roughly the height of a door and smelling of brine and cold stone. Aanya had told herself it would only take twenty minutes.

That was before the first tunnel narrowed to a crawl, before the floor turned slippery with weed, and before the dripping became a sound she could no longer ignore.

She squeezed through a gap and emerged into a larger chamber. Her torch swept the walls: rust-red rock streaked with white mineral lines, a ceiling hung with glistening stalactites like a frozen chandelier. At the far end, a pool of deep green water lay perfectly still. She moved towards it, her breath coming in small excited clouds in the cold air.

That was when she heard it — a low, rhythmic hiss from somewhere behind her.

Aanya turned. Where the passage mouth had been dry, a silver tongue of seawater was creeping across the floor, spreading slowly but with a horrible, patient certainty. Her stomach dropped. She hadn't checked the tide table — she'd promised herself she had, but standing here now, with water licking the hem of her boots, she knew she hadn't.

'Think,' she whispered.

She swung the torch back towards the pool. There was a ledge above it, perhaps a metre wide, jutting from the rock at shoulder height. She calculated the distance, measured it against the rising water, against the time it might take for the sea to fill the chamber. Her legs were already trembling, though she couldn't tell if it was cold or fear.

She grabbed a handhold, jammed her boot into a crack in the rock and hauled herself upward. The torch slipped from her fingers and clattered down; it landed on the ledge below rather than in the water, which was its own small miracle. She could still see the pale beam cutting across the rippling surface.

The water was rising faster now. It swallowed the passage mouth completely; she could see nothing but a churning dark circle where the entrance had been. The hiss had deepened to a low, reverberant roar.

Aanya pressed herself against the wall of the chamber, her back against cold stone, feet on the ledge, and tried to remember everything her older brother had told her about caves. He'd mentioned air pockets. He'd mentioned the fact that tides always turned. What he hadn't mentioned was how long you might have to wait.

She drew her knees in and watched the torchlight shiver on the moving water below. Somewhere deep inside the cliff, the sea continued its unhurried work — filling, pressing, climbing — and Aanya realised that patience, right now, was the only thing she had left.