how much better and easier it
is to take the likelihood of extinction with men who have the same
mental disgust as your own, and can endure it till they die, but who,
while they live in the same torment with you, have the unspoken but
certain conviction that Europe is a decadent old beast eating her young
with insatiable appetite, than to sit in sunny breakfast-rooms with the
newspaper maps and positive arguments of the unsaved!

_Autumn 1917._

XVI. The Dunes

The dunes are in another world. They are two miles across the uncertain
and hazardous tide races of the estuary. The folk of the village never
go over. The dunes are nothing. They are the horizon. They are only
seen in idleness, or when the weather is scanned, or an incoming ship
is marked. The dunes are but a pallid phantom of land so delicately
golden that it is surprising to find it constant. The faint glow of
that dilated shore, quavering just above the sea, the sea intensely
blue and positive, might wreathe and vanish at any moment in the pour
of wind from the Atlantic, whose endless strength easily bears in and
over us vast involuted continents of white cloud. The dunes tremble in
the broad flood of wind, light, and sea, diaphanous and fading, always
on the limit of vision, the point of disappearing, but are established.
They are soundless, immaterial, and far, like a pleasing and personal
illusion, a luminous dream of lasting tranquillity in a better but an
unapproachable place, and the thought of crossing to them never
suggests anything so obvious as a boat. They look like no coast that
could be reached.

It was a perverse tide on a windless day which drifted me over. The
green mounds of water were flawless, with shadows of mysteries in their
clear deeps. The boat and the tide were murmuring to each other
secretly. The boat's thwarts were hot and dry in the sun. The serene
immensity of the sky, the warmth and dryness of the boat's timbers, the
deep and translucent waters, and the coast so low and indistinct that
the silent flashing of the combers there might have been on nothing
substantial, were all timeless, and could have been but a thought and a
desire; they were like a memorable morning in a Floridan cay
miraculously returned. The boat did not move; the shore approached,
revealed itself. It was something granted on a lucky day. This country
would not be on the map.

I landed on a broad margin of sand which the tide had just left. It wa