He struck to the north. Over there in the north the sea was of a violet blue accentuated by the white blaze of the sands.
The sands, once one got moving on them, were full of interest, strewn along the sea-edge with all sorts of prizes,—colored shells, cuttlefish bones, extraordinary seaweeds, bits of wreckage; a few yards out a nautilus fleet was steering, with tiny sails set to the wind, the oldest ships that ever floated on the sea, unspoiled by storm and time, just as they were launched in the morning of the world. He watched them for awhile, forgetful of gulls’ eggs, or quicksands, or the sun, now sensibly declining.
If ever things had purpose, these had. They were going somewhere, bound on some business, keeping formation, and possessed of charts and compasses and barometers as surely as of sails. They made him think of God, and then they made him think of Satan,—Satan, whose sea sense served him better than all precise knowledge.
Then he remembered Jude and glanced back. Away, far away to the south, he saw her. The sands dipped and rose there, and sometimes she was invisible and his heart thumped to the idea that a quicksand had taken her, then she reappeared and he went on, and, ever as he went, he seemed walking deeper into loneliness, peopled with viewless things and half-heard voices.
Sometimes a chiming sound like the shattered and mingled voices of distant bells filled the air,—it was the singing of the sands. He had not noticed it in company with Jude, but here alone he noticed it. Sometimes laughter, far away in the distance, came distinct, human, and startling,—it was the calling of a laughing gull,—and always, penetrating all other sounds with the subtlety of osmosis, the silky, sinister whisper of the wind playing with the sand-grains. He went on. Something nearly tripped him. It was a great spar, half sanded over, the relic of some ship that had come to grief, maybe, on the spit.
The sight of this spar touched everything with a new and momentary color. “Gascoign, the Sandal Wood Trader,” and other old stories he had read in his boyhood came back to him half-remembered, and with them came a whiff from a world he had half-forgotten,—a breath of the air we breathe at fifteen.
He saw to his satisfaction that the gulls were beyond his reach, a broad channel of water cutting the spit in two right ahead. He took his seat on the spar for a moment to rest and look about, and as he sat the gulls, wheeling and crying, kept up around him the elusive atmosphere of storyland.
All the money in the world could not have brought him that! Nor could he have found it had he landed here from a yacht with grown-up companions.
He fell to thinking what an extraordinarily lucky person he was, and to plume himself on his instinctive wisdom in dropping Skelton and civilization for Jude and Satan, who had led him into a world of things he had never seen, things he had never imagined, things he had half-forgotten.
Carquinez alone was a revelation, to say nothing of Sellers and Cleary. There was only one cloud, smaller than a man’s hand; but there!—where was it to end? It was all very well talking to Jude about sailing round the world: you can’t sail out of Time, and the time would come—the time would come—