THE FLATS 29 



wideawake dream, an other-worldliness without a hint 

 of vagueness, strange yet real. Algae were pinkish-red 

 and grass lit by golden brown ; the pools were a deep 

 cobalt, and in the distance were strips of pale purple, 

 blue, and softest roseate, while over all the sky was 

 streaked, ravelled, and combed with white on a blue 

 ground. When the sun set, the seaweed on the slime 

 glittered a metallic emerald, the pools glowed an intense 

 violet, and the sun itself a molten gold. 



Chromatic dramas of this kind were always performing 

 — there were several houses a day — but one in particular 

 was impressed upon me. I was on the shore at Holkham, 

 two miles from Wells-next-the-Sea. Just beyond the 

 Sandhills there is a long and thin crescentic line of pines, 

 in front of which " the lone and level sands stretch far 

 away." If the traveller stands in the middle of this 

 smooth floor on a fine day he will seem to be surveying 

 the landscape of a different planet, so singular is the 

 effect of the great semi-circular disc of buff and yellow 

 sand, broidered on one side by the ultramarine of the 

 sea, intense as the blue on the Virgin's robe in an old 

 Italian picture, and on the other by the darkest green 

 of the pines. The effect was not only singular, but 

 estranging, shrinking the human personality beneath 

 even the sandhoppers, an alien in an unpeopled and 

 inhospitable wilderness. 



The population of these flats is chiefly gulls and wading 

 birds. On first acquaintance with the latter one feels 

 no more desire to discriminate between them than to 

 count the separate leaves of a tree. It is by no means 

 easy, for they are greatly persecuted, most of them of 

 an exceeding shyness and of a strong family likeness, 

 nor is there any cover by which to approach them. In 

 colour, too, they are much alike, especially after the 

 moult, and to identify, to particularize these grey, fawn 

 and silvery forms, drifting, gliding and whirling over 

 the waste in the pearly light bathing all the land, like 

 shadows in a dream, seems somewhat to sacrifice the 

 general, harmonious impression, to drag them out of 

 an environment into which they so perfectly melt. 

 Indeed, the wide desolation of the flats seems to endow 



