lue as a fragment
of sky. The silence of the desert was that of a dream, but when
listening to the quiet, a murmur which had been below hearing was
imagined. The dunes were quivering with the intensity of some latent
energy, and it might have been that one heard, or else it was the
remembrance held by that strand of a storm which had passed, or it
might have been the ardent shafts of the sun. At the landward end of
the waste, by the foot of the dunes, was an old beam of a ship, harsh
with barnacles, its bolt-holes stopped with dust. A spinous shrub grew
to one side of it. A solitary wasp, a slender creature in black and
gold, quick and emotional, had made a cabin of one of the holes in the
timber. For some reason that fragment of a barque was more eloquent of
travel, and the work of seamen gone, than any of the craft moored at
the quay I left that morning. I smoked a pipe on that timber--for all I
knew, not for the first time--and did not feel at all lonely, nor that
voyages for the discovery of fairer times were finished.

Now the dunes were close they appeared surprisingly high, and were
formed, not like hills, but like the high Alps. They had the peaks and
declivities of mountains. Their colour was of old ivory, and the long
marram grass which grew on them sparsely was as fine as green hair. The
hollowed slope before me was so pale, spacious, and immaculate that
there was an instinctive hesitation about taking it. A dark ghost began
slowly to traverse it with outspread arms, a shade so distinct on that
virgin surface that not till the gull, whose shadow it was, had gone
inland, following its shadow over the high yellow ridge, did I know
that I had not been looking at the personality. But the surface had
been darkened, and I could overcome my hesitation.

From the ridge, the country of the dunes opened inland with the
enlarged likeness of a lunar landscape surveyed in a telescope. It
merely appeared to be near. The sand-hills, with their acute outlines,
and their shadows flung rigidly from their peaks across the pallor of
their slopes, were the apparition of inviolable seclusion. They could
have been waiting upon an event secret from our knowledge, larger than
the measure of our experience; so they had still the aspect of a
strange world, not only infinitely remote, but superior with a greater
destiny. They were old, greatly older than the ancient village across
the water. Ships left the village and went by them to s