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Among the grains of sand and flakes of mica furtive bubblings, burrowings, and upheavals betrayed a benighted folk to whom the water was as a firmament into which they might not venture to ascend. Sought out by the sun, translucent fish revealed their presence by spectral shadows on the sand, and, traced by the shadows, became discernible, though but little the more substantial.
Gradually he became conscious of Whitefoot moving, silent as a shadow, beside his master. Once, when Stair stood a long time on the craggy top of the Fell of Rathan, gazing out at the ranged lights on the English side of the firth, he was conscious of a cool, damp nose thrusting its way into his palm, causing him to open his hand by little calculated snout-pushes and burrowings.
And he at last understood the character of this funereal, termite-like labour these chance burrowings continued according to requirements, without art, method, or symmetry. The rugged soil was ever ascending and descending, the sides of the gallery snaked: neither plumb-line nor square had been used.
While it was slightly disturbed on the surface by the passage of the Euphrosyne, beneath it was green and dim, and it grew dimmer and dimmer until the sand at the bottom was only a pale blur. One could scarcely see the black ribs of wrecked ships, or the spiral towers made by the burrowings of great eels, or the smooth green-sided monsters who came by flickering this way and that.
'Hollo! cried John, twitching one end of the dragged veil. 'Coom, wakken oop, will 'ee? After several burrowings into the old corner, and many exclamations of impatience and fatigue, the figure struggled into a sitting posture; and there, under a mass of crumpled beaver, and surrounded by a semicircle of blue curl-papers, were the delicate features of Miss Fanny Squeers.
The peak of the cross, lifting a needle point high above them, as if keeping watch over the Blue Mountains, the far-distant Idaho hills, the near-by forests of Oregon, and the puny, man-made structures at its feet, appeared to have a lofty disdain of them and the burrowings into its mammoth sides, as if all ravagers were mere parasites, mad to uncover its secrets of gold, and futile, if successful, to wreak the slightest damage on its aged heart.
The ice remains solid for another month or so, and on its hard surface these water-hating enemies travel and tear open these nests and devour those that have not deep enough burrowings in which to hide themselves away. Of course, as soon as open water comes they are safe, as they are thoroughly amphibious animals."
In the foreground the earth is all tunnelled and tumbled; quarries stretch in every direction, with huge, gaunt, straddling, gallows-like structures emerging, a wheel spinning at the top, and ropes travelling into the abyss; heaps of grey débris, interspersed with stunted grass, huge excavations, ugly ravines with a spout of grim stone at the seaward opening, like the burrowings of some huge mole.
Men have acquired titles more easily. That was apparent as Robert Turold related the history of his long and patient investigation; of scents which had led nowhere; of threads which had broken in his hand; of fruitless burrowings into the graves of past generations. These disappointments had lengthened the search, but they had never, baffled the searcher nor broken his faith.
If the burrowings and tortuous course of the obnoxious depredator give indication of its having been of huge proportions for its species, for these creatures vary in size from a small pin to nearly an eighth of an inch in diameter, and the tunnellings are not very close together, then pieces of fresh wood matched carefully and fitted in the manner before described, must be inserted and glued in.
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