ates of
the atmosphere it is utterly and barrenly hideous. Only when one sees it
from afar, when the sun is setting and the white sea is aflame, does it
become beautiful. Certainly Las Palmas is not lovely.

And yet there is one beauty at Las Palmas, a beauty that none of the
natives can appreciate and few of the visitors ever see. It is a kind of
beauty which demands a certain training in perceiving the beautiful.
There are some folks in this world who cannot perceive the beauty of a
sunset reflected in the mud of a tidal river at the ebb. They have so
keen a sense of the ugliness of mud that they fail to see the
reflections of gold and pink shining on the wet surface. It is so with
sand, and Las Palmas has some of the greatest and most living sand-dunes
in the world. And not only does it owe its one great beauty to the sand,
it owes its prosperity to it as well. Yet folks curse its great folded
dunes, which by blocking the channel between the main island and the
Isleta have created the sheltered Puerto de la Luz, where all its
shipping lies in security from the great seas breaking in Confital Bay.
These dunes rise two hundred feet at least, and for ever creep and shift
and move in the draught of keen air blowing north and north-west. In the
sunlight (and it is on them the sunlight seems most to fall) they shine
sleekly and appear to have a certain pleasant and silky texture from
afar. But as we walk towards them the light gets stronger, almost
intolerably strong, and when one is among them they deceive the eye so
that distances seem doubled. And they lie and move in the wind. Day
after day I watched them, and walked upon them, and on no two days were
they alike; their contours changed perpetually, changed beneath one's
eyes like yellow drifting snow. They advanced in walls, and the leeward
scarp of these walls was of mathematical exactness. As the wind blew the
sands moved, a million grains were set in motion, so that at times the
surface was like a low cloud of sand driving south-east. In the lee of
the greater dunes were carven hollows, and here the sand-clouds moved in
faint shadows. A gust of wind made one look up into the clear sky for
clouds where there were none. The motion of the sand was like shot silk.
Now and again we came to a vast hollow, a smooth crater, a cup, and from
its bottom nothing was visible but the skyline and the sky. Again we saw
over the blazing yellow ridge sudden white roofs of the Puerto a