The Sands, even on the brightest day, are the abomination of desolation to the last detail. They are, it is true, “ship-swallowers,” but are sometimes nice in their appetite, or over-gorged, and cannot fully dispose of every wreck; and so the clinching evidence of disaster is rarely lacking, in the protruding timbers of a lost ship, or the fluke of an almost entirely buried anchor; although it becomes the duty of the Trinity House to remove--generally by blowing up with dynamite-- any wreckage here that is considered to be dangerous to navigation. To stand contemplative upon the Goodwins is a strange and deeply impressive experience. The expanse of doleful grey sand, almost mud-coloured, fully bears out the Shakespearean description of this “dangerous flat and fatal.” It is so nearly awash and so mixed up with watery gullies that the waves that come curling and snarling upon the edge appear about to overwhelm you. Except for the sound of them, an uncanny stillness prevails, and the great expanse of the sky and the distant white cliffs from near Deal on to Ramsgate intensify the loneliness. A horror of the solitude seizes you, not lessened by the strange tameness of the gulls that numerously patter about and seem to welcome your company. Attempts have from time to time been made to provide some warning beacon to mark the Goodwins, but it is now recognised that lightships form the only practical solution of the difficulty. It was at about the close of the seventeenth century that the first effort to establish a beacon was made; but the borings failed to reach any firm basis, and the Sands were declared to be of unfathomable depth. Even in modern times they have been held by marine surveyors to be of the great depth of some eighty or ninety feet. Sir Charles Lyell, on the other hand, stated them to be only fifteen feet deep, resting on a base of blue clay. The opinion of the seafaring men of the Kentish coast, who are not geologists, or by way of being scientific men, but who have at any rate a practical acquaintance with the Goodwins in all weathers, is that the depth is indeed very great. [Illustration: THE EAST GOODWIN LIGHTSHIP]