have been thought the faint far echo of a hail he in the end set down
reluctantly to a trick of the hag-ridden wind; to whose savage voice he
durst not listen long; in such a storm, on such a night, a man had but
to hearken with a credulous ear to hear strange and terrible voices
whispering, shrieking, gibbering, howling untold horrors....

An hour passed, punctuated at frequent intervals by gunshots. Though
they evoked no answer of any sort, hope for Quain died hard in Amber's
heart. With all his might he laboured to convince himself that his
friend must have overtaken the drifting boat, and, forced to relinquish
his efforts to regain the beach, have scudded across the bay to the
mainland and safety; but this seemed a surmise at best so far-fetched,
and one as well not overlong to be dwelt upon, lest by that very
insistence its tenuity be emphasised, that Amber resolutely turned from
it to a consideration of his own plight and problematic way of escape.

His understanding of his situation was painfully accurate: he was
marooned upon what a flood tide made a desert island but which at the
ebb was a peninsula--a long and narrow strip of sand, bounded on the
west by the broad, shallow channel to the ocean, on the east connected
with the mainland by a sandbar which half the day lay submerged.

He had, then, these alternatives: he might either compose himself to
hug the leeward side of a dune till daybreak (or till relief should
come) or else undertake a five-mile tramp on the desperate hope of
finding at the end of it the tide out and the sandbar a safe footway
from shore to shore. Between the two he vacillated not at all; anything
were preferable to a night in the dunes, beaten by the implacable
storm, haunted by the thought of Quain; and even though he were to find
the eastern causeway under water, at least the exercise would have