"What about all that stuff?" and he jerked his head towards the graveyard wreckage.
"I couldn't go again yet."
"Nor me either.... Ground's higher over yonder," he said. "Let's go and see," and they set off slowly over the sand.
The level of high water was thickly strewn with seaweed and small wreckage. The slope of the shore was so long and gentle that no large object could come in unless it were first broken into fragments outside.
The mate kicked over the sea-weed and found some which he put into his mouth.
"Any good?" asked Wulfrey anxiously, hungrier than ever at sight of the other's working jaws.
"Better'n nothing," and he rooted up another piece and handed it over. Wulfrey found it tough and pungent of the sea and, after much chewing, capable of being swallowed, but the most he also could say for it was that it was just that much better than nothing.
They each picked up a piece of wood with which to root in the tangle, and, bending and picking and munching, made their way slowly towards the hummocks in front.
These were a low range of sandhills, some of them as much as thirty feet high, and on the seaward side, which they climbed, they were sparsely clothed with coarse slate-green wire-grass about a foot in height, which bristled up like porcupines' quills and helped to keep the loose soft sand together. They pulled some up to see if the roots looked edible, and found them spreading far and wide below ground in a matted tangle of white succulent-looking tendrils, which proved as tough and unsatisfying as the sea-weed, but had the advantage of a different flavour.
Grubbing along, they climbed heavily through the yielding sand to the top of the nearest hummock. Macro, arriving there first, jerked a gratified "Gosh!" and floundered down the other side whirling his stick, and Wulfrey was just in time to catch the amazing sight of the whole surface of the little valley beyond in violent motion.