I often thought what a fine thing Stevenson would have written from the local colour of the bay.
Its changing colours were intense and wonderful. In the early morning the waves were a rich royal blue, with splashing lines of white breakers rolling in and in upon the pale grey sand, and the sea-birds skimming and wheeling overhead.
At mid-day it was colourless, glaring, steel-flashing, with the sunlight blazing and everything shimmering in the heat haze.
In the early afternoon, when Hawk and I used to go down to the shore and strip naked like savages, and plunge into the warm water, the bay had changed to pale blue with green ripples, and the outline of Imbros Island, on the horizon, was a long jagged strip of mauve.
Later, when the sunset sky turned lemon-yellow, orange, and deep crimson, the bay went into peacock blues and purples, with here and there a current of bottle-glass green, and Imbros Island stood clear cut against the sunset-colour a violet-black silhouette.
Queer creatures crept across the sands and into the old Turkish snipers' trenches; long black centipedes, sand-birds—very much resembling our martin, but with something of the canary in their colour. Horned beetles, baby tortoises, mice, and green-grey lizards all left their tiny footprints on the shore.
“If this silver sand was only in England a man could make his fortune,” said Hawk. (“We wept like anything to see—!”)
I never saw such white sand before. One had to misquote: “Come unto these SILVER sands.” It glittered white in a great horse-shoe round the bay, and the bed of the Salt Lake (which is really an overflow from the sea) was a barren patch of this silver-sand, with here and there a dead mule or a sniper's body lying out, a little black blot, the haunt of vultures.
I made some careful drawings of the sand-tracks of the bay; noting down tracks being a habit with the scout.
In these things Hawk was always interested, and often a great help; for, in spite of his fifty years and his buccaneerish-habits, he was at heart a boy—a boy-scout, in fact, and a fine tracker.