such a point you may discern a multitude of blackened, snaggy
shapes protruding above the water,--some high enough to resemble
ruined chimneys, others bearing a startling likeness to enormous
skeleton-feet and skeleton-hands,--with crustaceous white growths
clinging to them here and there like remnants of integument.
These are bodies and limbs of drowned oaks,--so long drowned that
the shell-scurf is inch-thick upon parts of them. Farther in
upon the beach immense trunks lie overthrown. Some look like
vast broken columns; some suggest colossal torsos imbedded, and
seem to reach out mutilated stumps in despair from their
deepening graves;--and beside these are others which have kept
their feet with astounding obstinacy, although the barbarian
tides have been charging them for twenty years, and gradually
torn away the soil above and beneath their roots. The sand
around,--soft beneath and thinly crusted upon the surface,--is
everywhere pierced with holes made by a beautifully mottled and
semi-diaphanous crab, with hairy legs, big staring eyes, and
milk-white claws;--while in the green sedges beyond there is a
perpetual rustling, as of some strong wind beating among reeds:
a marvellous creeping of "fiddlers," which the inexperienced
visitor might at first mistake for so many peculiar beetles, as
they run about sideways, each with his huge single claw folded
upon his body like a wing-case. Year by year that rustling strip
of green land grows narrower; the sand spreads and sinks,
shuddering and wrinkling like a living brown skin; and the last
standing corpses of the oaks, ever clinging with naked, dead feet
to the sliding beach, lean more and more out of the
perpendicular. As the sands subside, the stumps appear to creep;
their intertwisted masses of snakish roots seem to crawl, to
writhe,--like the reaching arms of cephalopods....