Anibare Bay is the one Pacific-looking stretch of Nauru, the smallest island nation on Earth, a crescent of white sand two kilometres long on the east coast curved into the scar where the island's flank slid into the sea, with pinnacles of black coral rock standing out of mirror-still tide pools, on an island whose interior was mined away for phosphate and stands as a moonscape of limestone spires. Nauru is a raised coral atoll of 21 square kilometres, and its ring road of nineteen kilometres circles the whole country in half an hour, past the airport runway, the harbour, the fishing settlements and the flank of Topside, the plateau where a century of phosphate mining left coral-limestone spires standing between the hollows emptied of the rock that made the country briefly the richest per head in the world; Anibare is the beach the islanders and the few visitors use, with a harbour of Japanese-built breakwaters at one end and the tide pools at low water, where the black stacks rise straight out of shallow water and the swimming is inside the reef, since the drop-off is close to shore and the currents beyond are strong. Nauruans still paddle small outrigger canoes out past the reef to fish, and the whole crossing is followed from the sand.
As the light drops, black noddies stream back from open water to roost in the escarpment woods above the bay, and they are caught with lassoes on long poles to be eaten, an old island skill, while the Nauru reed warbler, the one bird that lives on this island and nowhere else, sings in the scrub the mining missed. The island sits under sixty kilometres from the equator, so nothing moves but the rain, with May to November the drier half and no cyclone ever recorded. The refugee camps of the Australian offshore system stood on Topside, and the country's few thousand people live along the coast road. Anibare is the beach of a country that dug itself up, and the sea in front of it is what was left whole.