The Good Priest of Nissard

Till at the set of sun all tracks and ways
In darkness lay enshrouded.  And e'en thus
The utmost limit of the great profound
At length we reach'd, where in dark gloom and mist
Cimmeria's people and their city lie
Enveloped ever.--ODYSSEY (MUSGROVE)


The October afternoon had set in before the brothers were the way
to Nissard; and in spite of Berenger's excited mood, the walk
through the soft, sinking sand could not be speedily performed.  It
was that peculiar sand-drift which is the curse of so many coasts,
slowly, silently, irresistibly flowing, blowing, creeping in, and
gradually choking all vegetation and habitation.  Soft and almost
impalpable, it lay heaped in banks yielding as air, and yet far
more than deep enough to swallow up man and horse.  Nay, tops of
trees, summits of chimneys, told what it had already swallowed.

The whole scene far and wide presented nothing but the lone, tame
undulations, liable to be changed by every wind, and solitary
beyond expression--a few rabbits scudding hither and thither, or a
sea-gull floating with white, ghostly wings in the air, being the
only living things visible.  On the one hand a dim, purple horizon
showed that the inhabited country lay miles inland; on the other
lay the pale, gray, misty expanse of sea, on which Philip's eyes
could lovingly discern the THROSTLE'S masts.

That view was Philip's chief comfort.  The boy was feeling more
eerie and uncomfortable than ever he had been before as he plodded
along, sinking deep with every step almost up to his ankles in the
sand, on which the bare-footed guide ran lightly, and Berenger,
though sinking no less deeply, seemed insensible to all
inconveniences.  This desolateness was well-nigh unbearable; no one
dared to speak while Berenger thus moved on in the
unapproachableness of his great grief, and Philip presently began
to feel a dreamy sense that they had all thus been moving for
years, that this was the world's end, the land of shadows, and that
his brother was a ghost already.