nd the
masts of ships, and then a streak of blue more intense than ever because
of the red yellow of the sand. And all the time the dunes moved, lived
and marched south-east, while the sands rose up out of the sea of the
windy bay and marched overland. The sand itself was very dry, very fine,
so fine indeed that when it trickled through the fingers it felt like
fine warm silk. No particle adhered to another. As I raked it through my
fingers the sand ran in strange, enticing curves, each pouring stream
finely lined, as if it was woven of curious fibres, making a wonderful
design of interlacing columns. And deep beneath the surface it held the
heat of yesterday.

To sit upon, within, these dunes and see the wind dance and the sand
pour had a strange fascination for me. I lost the sense of time and yet
had it impressed upon me. The march of the sand was slow and yet fast;
there was a strange sense of inevitability about it; each grain was
alive, moving, bent on going south-east. There was silence and yet an
infinite sense of motion; no life and yet a sense of living. The sand
came up from the sea, marched solemnly and descended into the sea again.
The two seas were two eternities; that narrow neck of sand was life.
Distances grew great in the sun and the glare; it was a desert and a
solitude, and yet close at hand were all the works of man. I often sat
in the folds of the dunes and soaked in the sunshine as I was lost to
the world.

And beyond it all was Confital Bay; there I forgot that Las Palmas was
ugly, a bastard child of Spanish mis-rule and modern commerce, for the
curve of the bay and its sands and boulder beach to the eastward were
wonderful. For though Confital is but a few steps across the long sand
spit to leeward of which the commercial port lies, it might be a
thousand miles away as it faces the wind and has its own quiet and its
own glory of colour. The sea tumbles in upon a beach of shingle and sand
and is for ever in foam, and the colour of it is tropical. Away to the
left the hills above Banyodero and Guia are for the most part shadowy
with clouds. Often they are hidden, swathed in mist to the breakers at
their feet. And yet the sun shines on Confital and both bays, and on the
Isleta, which is red and yellow and a fine atmospheric blue away towards
Point Confital, where the sea thunders for ever and breaks in high foam
like a breaking geyser. On the beach at one's feet often lie Portuguese
men-of-war, t