The town, which is so thick and crowded with cars during the summer months, a host to the cities, teeming with talk and color, a variety of human shapes, sizes, and exclamations, so reclaimed that you can hardly conceive of its austere past, becomes diminished again to a mere cluster of houses, a tenuous edge on water and sand. On the far-going Atlantic side, the dunes billow and toss. The Ararats are everywhere, peaks, crowns, domes held down by yellow beach grass on the mounds and hillocks from which the slopes dive down. As the world’s dunes go, these may not be of major size and extent. On the other hand they have been measured at heights between sixty and eighty feet, and at times dune ridges may have reached elevations up to 100 feet. Also, their scale is such, leading from one open face to another, that human figures climbing a steep side across an intervening slope of no great distance seem tiny. The walls keep looming up and the valleys dip between, so that the whole landscape is full of a wide motion. In all this bare largesse of sand, the texture is clean and clear. Shadows move over it like loving hands. The wind’s touch in turn has made grooves, grains, and ribs on the surface. In some areas the black mineral magnetite joins with garnet to make blackish-purple ripples in the sand, or irregular masses, or little brushstroke feathers and clouds. Everything shows clearly, from human footprints and the long ruts made by beach buggies, to mice or rabbit tracks. And I suppose that in the summer--if you pounce in time--you can see insects leaving their traces, like dune grasshoppers, colored and grained like sand, or a spider that buries down in the sand, thus avoiding extreme temperatures; or even a toad. I once found a Fowler’s toad quite far out on the beach where it must have wandered away from the dunes. [Illustration] A stick that drops down from one of those shrubs so besieged by wind and sand waggles down a dune making a fine tracery, or what looks like a stamping of birds when it is lodged in one place and blown back and forth. An oak leaf merely blown for a slight distance down the sand makes a track, with all its lobe ends imprinted like a long tassel or thin strands of separate strings. Except for the beach-buggy tracks, that follow one route fairly consistently, and may be visible for months at a time, and the beach grasses, continually renewing their precise circles on the sand, most of these tracks soon disappear. There is a constant moving of sand particles, a sweeping over by the wind. The open dunes are trackless areas where tracks take on great significance.