56 
CAPE COD. 
ered with shrubbery, now glowing with the brightest 
imaginable autumnal tints; and beyond this were seen, 
here and there, the waters of the bay. Here, in Well- 
fleet, this pure sand plateau, known to sailors as the 
Table Lands of Eastham, on account of its appearance, 
as seen from the ocean, and because it once made a part 
of that town, — full fifty rods in width, and in many 
places much more, and sometimes full one hundred 
and fifty feet above the ocean, — stretched away north¬ 
ward from the southern boundary of the town, without 
a particle of vegetation, — as level almost as a table, — 
for two and a half or .three miles, or as far as the eye 
could reach ; slightly rising towards the ocean, then 
stooping to the beach, by as steep a slope as sand could 
lie on, and as regular as a military engineer could desire. 
It was like the escarped rampart of a stupendous for¬ 
tress, whose glacis was the beach, and whose champaign 
the ocean, — From its surface we overlooked the greater 
part of the Cape. In short, we were traversing a desert, 
with the view of an autumnal landscape of extraordmary 
brilliancy, a sort of Promised Land, on the one hand, 
and the ocean on the other. Yet, though the prospect 
was so extensive, and the country for the most part des¬ 
titute of trees, a house was rarely visible, — we never 
saw one from the beach, — and the solitude was'that of the 
ocean and the desert combined. A thousand men could 
not have seriously interrupted it, but would have been 
lost in the vastness of the scenery as their footsteps in 
the sand. 
The whole coast is so free from rocks, that we saw 
but one or two for more than twenty miles. The sand 
was soft like the beach, and trying to the eyes, when the 
sun shone. A fe'*' piles of diift-wood, which some wreck- 
