AT THE ESTUARY 141 



the harbour bar, covered with back blue mussels and 

 bits of hanging seaweed. I wonder do the stakes 

 ever rot away and need replacing ? Who planted them 

 there ? And must not they be, through the pre- 

 servatives of the salt sea, hard and seasoned as bog 

 oak ? These forlorn, and in some aspects even terrible, 

 stakes are such things as a cruel dream might offer a 

 shipwrecked man he must drown unless he can seize 

 and clamber up one of these black, dripping piles, 

 slimy with weed and sharp with edged shell-fish that 

 cut like jagged knives. These stakes are never wholly 

 out of water in any estuary I have seen. Even at 

 lowest tides the water laps round them, when the 

 banks of the estuary at its narrow neck slope down 

 dangerously, and the dry sands are hollowed and 

 hillocked into odd configuration. Here the sands 

 take the form of a raised geological map ; there they 

 are scooped into stalactite caves, dripping crystals, or 

 carved as some Gothic decorated architecture. 



