Sarakiniko is a bare white headland on the north coast of Milos, in the Greek Cyclades: no sand, no plants, no shade, only stone running into the Aegean. The rock is volcanic ash, and the north wind has sanded it smooth into rolling frozen waves. Barefoot it is warm and slightly springy. There is no beach here at all. A narrow inlet cuts into the headland — a ravine the sea has flooded — and you slide in off the smooth white stone. On a windless morning the water is clear enough to watch your own shadow travel across the bottom. At the seaward edge the rock is undercut into arches and low caves, and people drop off the ledges above them into deep water.
From a boat out of Adamas or Pollonia the headland reads as one long white wall pocked with caves, and you see how thin the plateau really is. The same trip puts you into coves you cannot walk to. A short walk east along the coast reaches the tanker Africa, driven onto these rocks in a December storm in 2003 and broken in two. What is left is rusted and half swallowed, and the surf takes a little more of it every winter. The name is older than the wreck. Sarakinos is the Greek word for Saracen, and the caves under this rock made a good place to hide a boat and wait for a ship worth taking. In the last light the hollows on the western lip of the ravine stay warm long after the sun has gone, and nothing up here is lit. The ground itself is worth looking down at. The paler bands are full of shells and sea urchins from the time all this lay under water. One fine band is twisted and folded — wet sediment that shuddered in an earthquake on the sea floor and then set that way, holding the shake in stone.