176 I N A G U A 



wrecks of a hundred million living creatures lay in large yellow 

 hills. I crumbled some of the buried particles between my 

 fingers and looked at them closely. They were all formed of the 

 corpses of once living matter. These hills were hills of death. 



Truly the land of the wind; the record was there to see, 

 preserved by remarkable chance. The dunes had formed, grown 

 to full dimension— and then frozen. Literally frozen; not by 

 chill of temperature, nor snow, nor blanket of ice but congealed 

 by the slow corrosive chemistry of grain against grain, of lime 

 against lime. The fresh seeping water of downpouring rain 

 had melted the sand, fused it together in one hard flinty mass. 

 One sees this story repeated everywhere in the Bahama Islands. 

 The blue ocean casts up its tons of dead sea creatures and the 

 winds and the rains soHdify the dunes into enduring stone be- 

 fore they have marched far. There are places where series after 

 series of frozen hills line up opposite windy shores like regi- 

 ments of marching soldiers; the outermost still soft and yielding, 

 fresh with the marks of the sea; the innermost hard and flinty, 

 pitted and scored with the scars of slow dissolution. Even hills 

 have their youth and old age; their flexible years and their set 

 and hardened decline. To be born; to grow and reach maturity; 

 to exist awhile and then crumble to dust again is the fate of all 

 substance; mineral and animal, the animate and inanimate, all 

 must pass this cycle. 



This is a universal picture. 



