served to keep him from freezing.

Ten minutes after his last cartridge had been fruitlessly discharged,
he set out for the ocean beach, pausing at the first dune he came upon
to scrape a shallow trench in the sand and cache therein both guns and
his game-bag. Marking the spot with a bit of driftwood stuck upright,
he pressed on, eventually pausing on the overhanging lip of a
twenty-foot bluff. To its foot the beach below was aswirl knee-deep
with the wash of breakers, broad patches of water black and glossy as
polished ebony alternating with vast expanses of foam and clotted
spume, all aglow with pale winter phosporescence. Momentarily, as he
watched, at once fascinated and appalled, mountainous ridges of
blackness heaved up out of the storm's grey heart, offshore, and,
curling crests edged with luminous white, swung in to crash and shatter
thunderously upon the sands.

Awed and disappointed, Amber drew back. The beach was impassable; here
was no wide and easy road to the east, such as he had thought to find;
to gain the sandbar he had now to thread a tortuous and uncertain way
through the bewildering dunes. And the prospect was not a little
disconcerting; afraid neither of wind nor of cold, he was wretchedly
afraid of going astray in that uncertain, shifting labyrinth. To lose
oneself in that trackless wilderness...!

A demon of anxiety prodded him on: he must learn Quain's fate, or go
mad. Once on the mainland it were a matter of facility to find his way
to the village of Shampton, telephone Tanglewood and charter a "team"
to convey him thither. He shut his teeth on his determination and set
his face to the east.