Fascinating, wonderful to look down upon. Alike, however diverse in size, shape or uses, in the impression of flat unsubstantiality conveyed to you—together with the doubt that the emmets crawling upon them could possibly be life-sized men. A drifting daisy-petal meant a smart private steam-yacht. You looked down from two thousand feet above, on the open-lidded snuffboxes that signified the fire-control and signalling-stations of some Leviathan of the Home Fleet, and a string of black holes jabbed in an oval of floating white millboard represented her funnels, black discs or white alternately stood for her ventilators; and her imposing deckworks, her turrets or barbettes, her gun-houses and casemates, and the terrible monsters bloodthirstily nosing out of them, were reduced to a more or less symmetrical arrangement in thick or thin black lines. The rosy light was greying. The gusts came more fitfully. To the south, upon the right hand, were stone-built fortifications with black muzzles of big guns poking from the ramparts, over stretches of salty marsh, drab-coloured mud-flats, and slimy rocks covered with blackened seaweed, sticking up from pale silvery sand-shoals, licked by the restless white tongues of the outgoing tide, and bumped by stranding buoys. Black dots and grey dots wheeled and scurried and settled. Crows and gulls were feeding ravenously as the tide drew off the flats and sand-shoals. And by the queer sensation in his empty stomach, Bawne knew that he too was ravenous.