We walked that night along a spectral sea. A wind had moved the harbor ice out of the hook of Provincetown, and this ice had drifted ashore on the outer side. Here and there a single cake lay stranded on the beach, but the great mass of it had gathered together to form a vague, broad band along the shore. It was afloat, and as the outer breakers dived beneath it and coursed ashore, the ghostly mass rose and fell, churning and groaning in the cold. Now here, now there along it, spectral eyes and slow glows of coldest phosphorescence, appeared, smouldered, and died, and our steps kicked phosphorescent patches in the sand. Presently my companion’s sharp and watchful eye saved me from stumbling over something on the border of the floe. We stooped, sheltered our tingling faces as well as we could, and flashed on an electric torch. A loon crouched there in the hissing and mysterious night, its breast feathers matted stiff with sand and fuel oil. The oil kills the wild fowl by thousands on the Cape, for it gums their feathers together when they have settled in a pool of it, and allows the cold to strike in through openings of unprotected flesh. The motionless, calm ray of the electric lamp lent an ironic serenity to the vast, wild dark, and the dying creature lifted its eyes to the white ray, dark uncomprehending eyes awaiting something incomprehensible and dread. We hurried on, and, coming to a wide turn, found ourselves exposed to the full fury of the sand. A wind with never a lull or a whirl, a wind with the directness of a channeled river, roared by us doubling the tiny lashes in number and in force. But we luckily had but a little taste of this, and soon reached the end of the first half of our patrol by Race Point light. The squat white tower stood close at hand, its placid and unearthly beam glancing along a length of the bordering floe. One could see the cakes rising and falling in great, heavy-laden curves, and the ghostly spurts and tosses of the water in between. Then Morris and I returned to the Coast Guard station with the sand at our backs, shook and slapped and stamped away as much of the sand as we could, and closed the hospitable door of Race Point upon the strident, inhospitable world. [Illustration: THE SANDS OF CAPE COD “Beyond the broad swath of churning breakers lies the North Atlantic, most masculine of seas.” THE FACINATING AND DESOLATE DUNES That furnish the stinging ammunition for the artillery of the wind] A WRECK UPON THE CAPE