Book Description

A sea of yellow sand rose, wave on wave, around us. High hills, carved by the bitter salt winds into tawny breakers, reared towering heads, peak upon peak. Like combers that never burst into spray, their static curves remained suspended above us, their tops bent back upon the leeward side, menacing, but never engulfing, the deep pools of purple shadows that lay beneath them. The sand was mauve in the hollows, and black upon white were the cupped dunes hung over their own heights. They were like water that did not move, or mountains with no vegetation. They did not support as much life upon their surface as that which crawls upon the floor of the ocean. They were naked and unashamed as the day when they were tossed up out of the bed of the sea. Only tufts of sharp green grass clung to some of the slopes, their silhouettes flattened out before them like the pin-feathers of a young bird, inadequate and scant, accentuating the barrenness of the saffron sand. Centuries ago some gigantic upheaval of Neptune had forced this long ridge out of the shielding water, to lie prone in the sight of the sun, like a prehistoric sea-monster forever drying its hide. More isolated than an island, the head of the cape, with the town in its jaws, fought the encroaching sea, which thundered upon it in constant endeavor to separate it from the tail, extending a hundred miles to the mainland. From the height on which we stood, the line of ocean far away was dark blue, following in a frothy scallop the indentations of the coast. The sound of the surf came to us like a repeated threat. It could bend the cape, but never break it, twist and turn it, change the currents and the sand-bars, and toss back upon its shore the wreckage of such vessels as men essayed to sail in, but the sand-dunes continued to bask blandly. Sometimes they shifted, but so silently and gradually that they seemed not so much to move as to vanish. To-day there would be a dune in the way of our path to the sea, so steep as to make a barrier, impossible to scale. To-morrow the force of the wind upon its surface, and the strength of the far-away tide which continually seeped its roots, would have leveled it. The very footsteps one followed, trying to trace a track across the waste, would have melted away. On this desert each traveler must be his own guide and climb to some eminence which topped all others, to get his bearings from the strip of deep blue that marked the ocean’s rim. Nor could he say to himself, securely, “Here is east,” although he looked out on the Atlantic. Land played a trick upon the wayfarer who trusted it, and turned its back upon the sea, and curled up like a snail, so that the inside of the cape, where the town lay behind us in its green verdure, faced south, and the outside sea, where the sun set, curved west and north. The glory of light in the afternoon struck first upon the hills and was reflected back from the sheltered bay to the little fishing-village. The path from the woods, by which you entered the dunes, lost itself to sight under the foliage of the scrub-oak trees, and unless you had tied a white rag to the last branch, marking the point where you climbed up out of the forest, you would never find it again. There were many foot-paths through the thicket which separated the hamlet on the inside of the horn from the immense dry sea-bed, but none of them were visible, once you had left them. By day you must mark the entrance to the desert of your own footsteps, by night it was useless to look for them.