the day was sunny and warm and the clear blue sky served as a perfect backdrop to the dark jagged hills that rose directly out of the quiet water , dark irregular piles of stone and earth and hardened lava that appeared to rise from the water without benefit of beach or shoreline or any gradual inclination at all , black shapes whose immediacy was part of their strangeness in a land more generally given over to flat paddies and gently terraced hillsides .