THE HIGH SAND.
"And round the roofs a golden gallery, That lent broad verge to distant lands, Far as the wild swan wings, to where the sky Dipt down to sea and sands."
THE great barrier sand which fringes the Norfolk coast, is the counterpart in our island of the Great Barrier Reef guarding the east Australian shore. From the Lynn Deeps eastward it swells and grows, until the myriad particles, compacted by tide and current, rise into the bank marked in the charts as the High Sand, which lies between wind and water, from Hunstanton to Yarmouth Roads. From Wells to Blakeney its summit caps all but the highest tides, soft in outline like golden snow, built up of matter as homogeneous as snow-flakes, and only less fantastic in contour than the snow-drifts, because water-soaked sand is heavier than an equal mass of clay. In the dark winter days the contrast of colours between the region of the sand and the parallel line of cultivated land, marks and emphasises the astonishing difference in kind between those adjacent tracts of mother earth. The contrast extends from earth to sky, for the salt sands invite the wind and repel the clouds, while the sodden uplands with their lines of wood, suck in the water and hug the mists in every hollow. Thus each region keeps its own scheme of colour, and covers this with an appropriate sky. Looking inland from the rounded summit of the sand, the eye meets long lines of gloom and darkness. Dull clouds brood in smoke and heaviness above the fields, and steam and mist rise from the earth to meet them, suggesting the origin of the post-Roman myth that here lay the land of everlasting twilight, to whose verge the ghostly ships were ever busy transporting the souls of the departed. Bat the edge of the bright sand marks the limit of these clinging vapours. As the leaden clouds drift seawards they are sucked outwards and upwards by ascending currents, the solid masses are drawn out, torn, and carded into flakes, as if by invisible fingers; the "rack dislimns," and whitens into drift and scud; lakes and splashes of azure broaden between the whitening clouds ; tall shafts of light stalk across the plain and along the margin of the bank whence comes the everlasting thunder of the sea. Under such shifting skies the tawny sand changes with every gleam of light, or shadow of cloud, or change of level in the bank. Where the mass rises like a turtle's back, or has beset the black timbers of the wrecks, it takes the colour of red-gold; where the shafts of light traverse it, or the wet flats lie, it pales and fades. When the clouds darken and descend, then the sand flushes and reddens, and the dark- ness, which kills all colour on the land, only brings out by contrast the warmth and glow of the limitless levels of the bank. When the tide is at its lowest, the sands seem more extensive even than the levels of the sea. Northwards the shallow sea itself seems to rise abruptly to the horizon, the lines of breakers appearing superimposed each upon the other, like a wall of faced grey flint with the white edges shining. But right and left the sand runs on for ever, its surface unbroken by wave or ridge, but marked from distance to distance by the wrecks, the beacons, and the dim outline of the fowlers' nets, hanging like giant cobwebs, or the sails of phantom ships.
The wrecks are the ancient ruins in this shifting realm of sand. For ten, twenty, thirty years they have been fixed in the bank as firmly as if held in molten lead. Like ruined castles, each has its story, accurately remembered in the history of the coast. Scarcely one of the crews has ever lived to reach the shore, for no lifeboat can cross the sand, into which the wrecks drift at high-water, and no man can swim through the miles of shallow surf to reach the land. One wreck was full of frozen Lascars, whose black corpses, wrapped in shreds of cotton cloth, were washed up day by day on the snow which covered the high sand. Another is the ruin of a sailing-ship of the largest size—the 'Pensacola '—loaded with immense balks of timber ; she came ashore with her masts smashed and her crew drowned, and grounded on the bank. There she lies yet, the deck facing the shore, her bottom filled with sand, her copper bolts green as malachite, and in her hold huge logs of tropical timber packed and wedged with pebbles, weed, and shells. Mile after mile, from wreck to wreck, of ship, ketch, brigantine, barque, schooner, and smack, the same story might be told. When the lifeboat has reached the wreck it has often only added to the victims of the sand. A vessel grounded in a gale on the outer sand, and the lifeboat was towed through devious channels and set loose out at sea to drift down to the wreck. The boat capsized, and all but two of the men were drowned. Of the survivors, -one clung to the boat till it was washed ashore. The other, by sheer strength, swam and struggled through the breakers across the whole width of the High Sand, through the inner channel, and into the sand-hills which bank the shore.
The line of highest elevation in this bank runs nearest to the sea. Here, at a distance of from one to two miles from the coast, the curve of the bank resembles that of the back of some enormous sole. At ordinary tides this is not covered by the sea, and to its safe surface, so smooth and uniform that it can conceal no enemy, a thousand wild grey. geese come every year from Lapland, and make it their nightly resting-place. If the tide covers the sand, the geese let it float them off their legs, and swim gently with the flood. At other times they sleep upon its highest line, leaving the sand at daybreak for the preserved fields and marshes inland. Some years ago the local fowlers, baffled in their attempts to shoot the geese when passing to and from the feeding-places, and aware of the danger of lying out upon the sand to shoot them by night, set up long lines of netting on the sand, to take the geese both when flying on dark nights and when swimming with the tide. At first the geese were caught in numbers. Now they are more wary ; but the nets remain, with wide meshes hanging loosely in the wind, and poles and crossbars, staged and rigged like masts.
Even stints and knots are caught in these nets, though the meshes are more than twenty inches across. Away to the east, by Stiffkey and Blakeney, vast flats and bights of wetter sand lie between the high bank and the shore. As the writer last crossed this region of emptiness, a furious steady gale was blowing from land to sea, with such insistence that the thousands of shore-birds upon the sands, though anxious to make their way against the storm to the shelter of Wells Harbour and the inner marshes, were constantly whirled backward like clouds of drifting leaves, towards the east. Nowhere on the world's surface, not even at sea, has the wind such absolute power as on these flats. Nothing even so large as a leaf breaks its force. It pushes like some giant hand, pressing every inch of body, face, limbs, and clothing. There are no lulls, or currents, or breathing space. All the lower air is full of grains of sand, moving swiftly on like dry mist, even across the wettest flats, grains taken from the "hills" on the shore, to he piled upon the highest bank sea- wards. There, except by virtue of the cohesion given by the daily tides, it has no firm abiding place. The next northern gale carries its millions of grains, with other millions added, back to the shore, where the greater part is piled among the marrnm-grass," and there remains in the ever-growing sand- hills, which in turn protect the inner marshes, and help them to grow into firm dry land. A sand-hill is not " made " so much as planted. Wherever a patch of" marrum-grass " takes root, there the sand blown from the great bank gathers round it. As the sand spreads, the grass grows through it, until the hard dry blades form the nucleus of thousands of tons of "hills." Near Holkham Bay, there lay not forty years ago a wet "lake," inside the high sand. There the " gunners " used to hide for curlew, digging holes, and filling them with " marrum-grass" to make them dry and comfortable. This grass took root, the sand gathered round, and where the " lake" lay is now a tumultuous mass of rounded hillocks, rising twenty feet above high-water level,—built by the " marrum-grass" from the surplus driftings of the mighty sand. On the great bank itself, there is little of the minor incident which interests even in the chance-built sand-hills; only a fringe of fragile razor-shells and pink sea-net along the margin of the sea, flocks of birds sitting, their white breasts shining in the sun, purple mussel-shells wrenched from the beds, and lying in spots of brilliant colour, on the tawny sand. But nowhere on dry land is there such a pervading sense of space, of air, of distance, of pure bright colour, and of the dominant presence of the sea.
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