ation of the gales, a line
of towans followed the curve of the coast, a desolate tract, gray-green
from the rushes planted to bind the shifting surface, and preserving in
its endless peaks and ridges the last fantastic glissades and diversely
elevated cones into which the wind had carved and gathered and swept the
sand. Mostly, these towans presented to the beach a low line of serrated
cliffs perhaps forty feet high; but from time to time they would break
away to gullies full of fine drifted sand, whose small cavities hoarded
snail-shells wind-dried to an ethereal lightness, and rabbit-bones
bleached and honeycombed by weather. After a storm the gullies gave an
impression of virgin territory, because the sand lay in drifts like
newly fallen snow on which footprints were desecration. The beach itself
was at low water a very wide and flat and completely desolate expanse,
shining near the sea's edge with whatever gold or silver was in the air,
shot with crimson bars at sunset, crinkled by the wind to a vast replica
of one of its own shells, ribbed and ploughed by tempests. The daily
advance or retreat of extreme high water was marked by devious lines of
purple muvices, by claws of seaweed and the stain of dry spume. Beyond
the limit of the spring tides the sand swept up in drifts against the
low cliffs that crumbled like biscuit before an attempted ascent.

This sea solitude reduced all living things to a strange equality of
importance. Twittering sea-swallows whose feet printed the sand with
desultory and fugitive intagliation, sea-parrots flying in profile
against the sky up and down over the water, porpoises rolling out in the
bay, sand-hoppers dancing to any disturbance, human beings--all became
equally minute and immaterial. Inland the towans tumbled in endless
irregularities of outline about a solitude equally complete. The
vegetation scarcely marked the changing seasons, save where in winter
the moss was a livelier golden-green, or where, beside spurges and
sea-holly and yellow horned poppies, stone-crops were reddened by August
suns. At wide intervals, where soil had formed over the sand, there was
a close fine grass starred in spring with infinitesmal squills and
forget-me-nots. But mostly the glaucous rushes, neither definitely blue
nor green nor gray, occupied the landscape. Close at hand they were
vitreous in color and texture, but at a distance and in the mass they
seemed to have the velvety bloom of a green al