On, therefore, he fled into the deceitful waste. At first, the sands were hard, even, and solid, yet so cool and damp under the worn and blistered feet of the wretched fugitive, that they gave him an immediate sense of pleasurable relief and refreshment; and for three or four miles he journeyed with such ease and rapidity as, compared to the pain and lassitude with which on the past days he had stumbled along, over the stony roads, and across the broken moors, that his heart began to wax more cheerful, and his hopes of escape warmed into something tangible and real. Ere long, the sun rose clear above the eastern fog-banks, and all seemed still fair and tranquil; the sands, dry as yet, and firm, smiled golden-bright under the increasing warmth and lustre of the day, and the little rivulets, by which the fresh waters oozed to the deep, glittered like silver ribbons, checkering the yellow expanse. The very gulls and terns, as they swooped joyously about his head, screaming and diving in the sunny air, or skimmed the sands in pursuit of such small fry as might have been left by the retreat of the waters, seemed, by their activity and happiness, to give him fresh hope and strength to support it. Occasionally he turned, and cast a hurried glance toward the hills he had just left, down which the slant rays were streaming, to the limit where the green grass and scattered shrubs gave way to the bare sea-sands; and, as from each anxious scrutiny of the ground, he returned to his forward progress without discovering any signs of peril, his face lighted up anew, and he advanced with a freer and a bolder foot. Still so weary was he, and so worn with his past toils, that he made but little real progress; and when he had been already an hour on the sands, he had accomplished little more than three miles of his route. The sands, from the point at which he had entered them, over against the city of Lancaster, and almost due west from that city to the nearest accessible headland of the opposite shore, were not less than nine miles in extent, the deepest and most dangerous parts being those nearest to the farther coast; but, measured to the place for which he was making, a considerable distance up the estuary of the Kent, they were at least three miles longer.