We even, so help me, tried to talk a hole through the wall! Yes, Krane thought of it, Trumpeter Krane.
"Maybe we could find the key sound of the dome," he said, "and shatter it with sound. You know, like marching steps shaking down a bridge."
Well, we tried, but got nowhere.
"Shovels, then," I said. "Entrenching tools! Maybe we can go under."
All hands groaned. There is nothing a marine or sailor dislikes more than digging in—even when bullets are flying thick and fast.
I think we were all a little mad then. It was bad enough to dig down into sand that poured into a hole faster than one could dig, but to accomplish nothing by doing it was heartbreaking. By day we perspired like hippos, rubbed the skin off our palms, got raw and bleeding where our clothes chafed. Water and food were no problem, for our mysterious source of supply never for a moment ceased or abated.
We fought that wall for days and nights on end, as a mob, in shifts, and singly. We got nowhere. There were times when the sand inside the dome looked as if a huge animal had been rooting, or a crowd digging for treasure. But when we stopped for a few moments to rest we could hear the sand whispering with glee as it slid back into the pits we had dug—leveling off the area again.
We managed in some places to get down ten feet or so into the sand, and to witness a strange phenomenon. We never got under the wall, nor were we able to penetrate it anywhere, yet when sand poured back into the pits we dug—it poured back from beyond the wall, too, as if there were no obstruction! It poured in, apparently through the very wall we were trying to breach.
Naturally we wondered, if we had been digging on the outside, trying to get in, if the sand would have poured outward into the holes, too. We all remembered how we had got into the dome so easily, yet we could find no way, shape, form or manner to get out.
The Shadow Men, however, had escaped....