Strand

“ From our very feet sloped downward toward the shore a golden strand many hundred feet wide, and extending on either hand far beyond the limits of our vision. This strand caught and radiated the morning light until wherever it was visible it glittered and glimmered like the dust of diamonds and other precious stones, and the waves, as they came and went in ceaseless motion, caught up this sparking sand and carried it on their crests, like the phosphorescence we sometimes see in the wake of a vessel in mid-ocean. ”

“ I have never walked up Fleet Street and the Strand yet without seeing a starving woman and child. The children are indeed dreadful; they run unguarded and unwatched out of the side courts into the broader and more lively Strand—the ceaseless world pushes past—they play on the pavement unregarded. ”

“ So the constant variety of the beach as one walks along it is connected with the multitude of variations in the soil below, the air above, and the water off shore. The mid-strand, too, is modified by the back-strand which abuts upon it. . . . And by the physical texture and contour of the back-strand the mid-strand may be affected very sharply—as when the rain is carried through the gullies in the back-strand down upon or across the area nearer the water's edge. ”

“ The tide of Empire has flowed westward along the Strand for generations which we may number but not realise, and it remains to-day the most important, as it was once the sole, highway between the two cities. ”

“ These were principally erected along that part of the foreshore which is nowadays known as the Strand, and soon, we are told, people from a distance, chiefly civilians, were enticed hither either by the inducements offered by trade, or by the growing reputation of the place as a beautiful and healthy spot. ”

“ They sometimes went, on excursions that they groaned at as professional, far afield from the Strand, but the curiosity with which they came back was mostly greater than any other, the Strand being for them, with its ampler alternative Fleet Street, overwhelmingly the Papers, and the Papers being, at a rough guess, all the furniture of their consciousness. ”

“ DOVER BEACH.
The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast, the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched sand,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in. ”

“ There are noblemen who have tall houses in the city and others who have built along the Strand, with fine grounds reaching to the river and looking out upon the woods which skirt the bear-gardens of Bankside in Southwark. The river is all alive with boats—wherries, barges, skiffs. There are no hackney carriages as yet for hire; but rich folks here and there rumble along the highways in heavy Flemish coaches. ”

“ Alone I walked the ocean strand;
A pearly shell was in my hand:
I stooped, and wrote upon the sand
My name—the year—the day.
As onward from the spot I passed,
One lingering look behind I cast:
A wave came rolling high and fast,
And washed my lines away. ”

“ Thus both the physical and biological conditions of the zone farther inland affect the beach flora quite as distinctly as do the conditions shoreward." The line between mid-strand and back-strand may be called a tension line, as between two general groups of plants striving to move in opposite directions, where a reciprocal stress is developed; and the plants of the mid-strand strive to enter the back strand, while the others try in turn to work out upon the mid-strand. ”

“ As the streets that lead from the Strand to the Embankment are very narrow, it is better not to walk down them arm-in-arm. ”

“ A little inland, the beach gives way to dry sand-hills, blown about by the wind, and over-grown by patches of blue-green marram-grass and other sandy seaside weeds. If you lie down on one of these sand-hills, choosing a spot not quite so dirty as its neighbours, you will soon be amused by seeing a curious little comedy going on perpetually around you in every direction. ”

“ The harbour is crowded with picturesque timber-ships and fishing-smacks, and is bordered by quays. The principal street is Strandgaden, on the Nordnaes, parallel with the harbour, communicating inland with the torv or marketplace, which fronts the harbour and contains the fish and fruit market. The portion of the city on the mainland rises in an amphitheatre. ”

“ There the shore for the most part consists of sand, which extends far out to sea, making it a favourable stranding-place for any vessel that has been torn from its anchorage during one of the frequent storms. ”

“ They roar and thunder, sob and laugh and hiss; they toss their new-found toys upon the sands, then snatch them back again and turn them ’round and ’round as if in envy of the grasping beach. But as the hours pass by, the shore keeps gaining what the billows lose. When the sun has pierced the western clouds, to cast a passing gleam across the panting sea, the glistening sands are dotted far and wide with worthless relics of the surf’s grim sport. ”

“ A coarse spear-like grass finds a sparse growth upon them, and does what it can to hold the sand in place; but it has a hard time of it, as its blades buried to their tips or its naked roots often testify.
But there is one part of this Beach that is ever much the same. It is a broad, shelving strip of sand between the hills and the sea, where the tide rises and falls, pounding and grinding, year in and year 14 out—the play-ground and the battle-ground of the surf. ”

“ You could walk straight across the bay to the hills opposite. From the look of the rocks, from the perpendicular cliffs on the coast, I had almost, without thinking, concluded that we were on the shore of a deep-water bay. It was high-water, or nearly so, then; and now, when I looked westward, it was over a long reach of sands, on the far border of which the white fringe of the waves was visible, as if there was their hitherto, and further towards us they could not come. Beyond the fringe lay the low hill of the Atlantic. ”

“ The wind had by this time nearly all died away, though the incessant roar of the surf continued on the beach. Hoping still that some one from the ill-fated vessel might escape to keep me company, I went again to the beach, walking along toward the creek. Seeing neither a body nor a sign of the boat, I started to follow along the bank of the creek with the intention of crossing it and searching along the shore in front of the bluff; but I had taken a few steps only when I stopped in astonishment, for almost at my feet, her shoulders upon a tangle of reeds, lay the body of a young woman. ”

“ Inshore, a tract of sand-hills borders on the beach. Here and there a lagoon, more or less brackish, attracts the birds and hunters. A rough, spotty undergrowth partially conceals the sand. The crouching, hardy, live-oaks flourish singly or in thickets—the kind of wood for murderers to crawl among—and here and there the skirts of the forest extend downward from the hills with a floor of turf and long aisles of pine-trees hung with Spaniard's Beard. ”

“ Then, downhill—with a trip and a flounder that sent the sand man-high—and at last you were on what Laura and Pin thought the most wonderful beach in the world. What a variety of things was there! Whitest, purest sand, hot to the touch as a zinc roof in summer; rocky caves, and sandy caves hung with crumbly stalactites; at low tide, on the reef, lakes and ponds and rivers deep enough to make it unnecessary for you to go near the ever-angry surf at all ”

“ We made for a beautiful landlocked harbour that seemed to promise shelter of the fairest; but it was only a mirage and faded into a long shelving beach of sand. We tried to anchor, but we could find no bottom. And as there was perfect calm we rowed towards the shore with a hawser, hoping to find some rock or tree on which to tie it. The sandy slope was but an illusion, too, and when we came to solid features we found there was nothing but a sheer wall of rock, rising to hundreds of feet above us, that laughed at our toil. ”

“ Here she was everywhere—amidst the silent trees of the woods that came, palm-fronded and vine-tendrilled, down to the sandy beach, on the beach itself, and on the barrier reef, from where the boom of the surf came like the bourdon note of an organ. The island, despite its beauty, was desolate; the spirit of the place seemed antagonistic to man. ”

“ The moment we emerged from the scrub out upon the eastern shore, we obtained a splendid view of the opposite coast of the great island, though the actual shore was not visible on account of the extreme lowness of the belt of littoral, which was many miles in width; but by climbing a tree we could just discern the long, dark line of palms, and here and there a narrow strip of white, denoting either surf or a sandy beach. ”

“ These sand hills are the most striking features of the Beach. The biggest of them are not more than sixty feet high, yet so hard a feat is it to climb to the top, and so extended is the view below you—on one side the wide Bay, on the other, the 13 ocean stretching its restless surface to the horizon—that you feel yourself upon an elevation tenfold as high. ”

“ On this stormy coast, where the surf breaks over huge rocks, and sometimes rushes curiously through them by passages worn in ages of incessant roll, there are several coves where the beach slopes gradually to the sea, and the smooth sand floor furnishes delightful bathing grounds. ”

“ If in any place the coast widened, little creeks ran in among the hills, and made the sea accessible from all points. The island consisted entirely of this one mountain-range; the higher peaks sometimes tipped with snow, with a strip of coast at their feet, sometimes narrowing to a little shingly beach, sometimes expanding to a fertile plain, where beautiful cities with fairy bell-towers and marble palaces gleamed like ivory carvings amidst the palms and thick green leaves. ”

“ A scarf of gray tops the sand bluffs of the opposite shore, and when the land looms, miragelike, scattered villages appear; or on certain clear evenings we may catch the twinkle of friendly lights. And in summer days when the languid creeks threading the marshlands add a brighter blue to the picture that throbs in the sun—water and sky and the dazzling collar of sand that yokes land and sea—the bay, seeming all but landlocked in its honey-colored bluffs, deceives us with a look of inland waters and lies as softly there as Long Pond among the hills. ”

“ Once on land, we realised, looking up the long, black hill ahead of us, and feeling the heat from a blazing sun directly overhead, that the walk would be a hard one, and that we must go slowly, in order to make it with any degree of comfort; but walk we must, or stay on the beach.
The pitch was in evidence immediately. Reefs of hard asphalt ran through the sandy beach into the sea. The hill was covered with asphalt, and down near the shore it lay in great wrinkles, where, when the road was being made, it had overflowed and taken to the hedgeway. ”

“ The streams that flow from the mountain-tops are absorbed far up by the slopes of débris and never reach the shore. Mr. A—— did discover a small, but uncertain, supply near his camp at the head of South-west Bay, but we felt that we could not rely on this, and that the issue in the ravine above us, which we had left on the previous evening, was the only one we could fall back upon with certainty on the whole weather shore of the island.
We walked along the sandy beach, with the mountains towering to the right of us and the ocean swell breaking heavily on the reefs to our left. ”

“ Out of the northeast they roll over gray-green leagues of cold sea, and as they bite deep into the sand of the shore behind Peaked Hill Bar, and drag it and all that is on it down into their maw and hurl it all back again, beating it on the beach and snatching it and beating it again, it roars inarticulate threats that make the onlooker draw back glad of a space of summer-dried sand between him and its depths. ”

“ They followed down the shore, sometimes upon the old and broken flume that runs along the seaward face of the hills that rise from the beach, or sometimes upon the beach itself, stepping from bowlder to bowlder, or holding along at the edge of the water upon reaches of white, hard sand. ”

“ The beach is a steep one, indicating a considerable weight of surf, and is composed chiefly of shingle with occasional patches of sand. It is backed by a terrace, 20 or 30 ft. high, similar to those terraces which, on more northern parts of the West Coast, have been found to cover ground richly auriferous. We washed a few shovelfuls, but there was not a speck of the true black sand. The weightiest was sand of a peculiarly light colour, apparently decomposed granite, and possibly containing garnets. ”

“ To an English mind that has had no experience of the East the term sea-beach conjures up visions of yellow sand, bathing-machines, groups of happy children, idle men and women taking a well-earned holiday. The long straight shore at Madras has nothing in common with the English beach. Yellow sand there is in abundance, in far greater abundance now than when my foot first touched it. ”