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Outside the fortified wall, which girt the city with its cincture of grey rock, a smooth plain stretched rearward to the foot of the hill on which we stood, and right and left along the crest of the ridge from Punta Hornos to Vergara, ranged a line of dark forms the picket sentries of the American outposts, as they stood knee-deep in the soft, yielding sand-drift.
We found horses in waiting, and rode about a mile to the village and residence of the Governor a Major in the Brazilian army; passing an immense sand-drift, which we had not expected to find on this volcanic rock.
Since the sand-drift first overtook us, scarcely as much time had elapsed as it has occupied to read the account I have given; but so dreadful were the sensations I experienced, and so intense my anxiety, that to me it appeared an age.
His horse might have sunk down, I thought, and then in a few moments he would for ever have been covered up from mortal sight; or, overcome with fatigue and the suffocating atmosphere, he might have fallen, and been unable to regain his steed. Or happily he might have passed through the sand-drift in safety, and have been all the time suffering with anxiety for my sake.
She had been slowly riding through a deep, soft sand-drift that was heaped at the mouth of the hollow, and when they had got through the opening, Caius saw the ribs of one side of an enormous wreck protruding from the sand, about six feet in height. A small hardy weed had grown upon their heads in tufts; withered and sear with the winter, it still hung there.
But as for him, dogs and swift fowls are like already to have torn his skin from the bones, and his spirit hath left him. Or the fishes have eaten him in the deep, and there lie his bones swathed in sand-drift on the shore. Yonder then hath he perished, but for his friends nought is ordained but care, for all, but for me in chief.
One sinewy brown arm was outflung, now almost wholly buried in the growing sand-drift. The hand still gripped a long, gleaming rifle, its stock and barrel elaborately arabesqued in silver picked out with gold. "Ah!" exclaimed the Master again, pulling at a thin crimson cord his questing fingers had discovered about the old man's neck. With hands that trembled a little, he drew out this cord.
The whole island is but a verdureless sand-drift, of which the outlines are constantly changing under the influence of winds and waters. Fort Moultrie, once close to the shore, as I am told, is now a hundred yards from it; while, half a mile off, the sea flows over the site of a row of cottages not long since washed away.
Then there is the desert; if you went there, your eyes would soon be full of sand with the lightest breeze, and if it should blow great guns, you would most likely find yourself in a sand-drift. Here is the best place for you, where there are frogs and locusts; here I shall remain, and so must you." And so they stayed.
The Master saw him in the wady, dimly visible through the ghostly white sand-shrouds spinning in the blue-whipped fire-glare. There on hands and knees the lieutenant was huddled. With eager hands he was tearing the hood of a za'abut a rough, woolen slave cloak, patched and ragged from the face of a prostrate figure more than half snowed under a sand-drift. "Nom de Dieu!" the Master heard him cry.
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