of sun all tracks and ways In darkness lay enshrouded.
And e'en thus The utmost limit of the great profound At length we
reach'd, where in dark gloom and mist Cimmeria's people and their city
lie Enveloped ever.--ODYSSEY (MUSGROVE)

The October afternoon had set in before the brothers were the way to
Nissard; and in spite of Berenger's excited mood, the walk through the
soft, sinking sand could not be speedily performed. It was that peculiar
sand-drift which is the curse of so many coasts, slowly, silently,
irresistibly flowing, blowing, creeping in, and gradually choking all
vegetation and habitation. Soft and almost impalpable, it lay heaped in
banks yielding as air, and yet far more than deep enough to swallow up
man and horse. Nay, tops of trees, summits of chimneys, told what it had
already swallowed. The whole scene far and wide presented nothing but
the lone, tame undulations, liable to be changed by every wind, and
solitary beyond expression--a few rabbits scudding hither and thither,
or a sea-gull floating with white, ghostly wings in the air, being the
only living things visible. On the one hand a dim, purple horizon showed
that the inhabited country lay miles inland; on the other lay the
pale, gray, misty expanse of sea, on which Philip's eyes could lovingly
discern the THROSTLE'S masts.

That view was Philip's chief comfort. The boy was feeling more eerie and
uncomfortable than ever he had been before as he plodded along, sinking
deep with every step almost up to his ankles in the sand, on which the
bare-footed guide ran lightly, and Berenger, though sinking no less
deeply, seemed insensible to all inconveniences. This desolateness was
well-nigh unbearable; no one dared to speak while Berenger thus moved on
in the unapproachableness of his great grief, and Philip presently began
to feel a dreamy sense that they had all thus been moving for years,
that this was the world's end, the land of shadows, and that his brother
was a ghost already. Besides vague alarms like these, there was the
dismal English and Protestant prejudice in full force in Philip's
mind, which regarded the resent ground as necessarily hostile, and
all Frenchmen, above all French priests, as in league to cut off every
Englishman and Protestant. He believed himself in a country full of
murderers, and was walking on with the one determination that his
brother should not rush on danger without him, and that the Popish
rogues should be kept i