This Sand Seemed To Us The Connecting Link Between Land And
Water.
It was a kind of water on which you could walk, and you
could see the ripple-marks on its surface, produced by the winds,
precisely like those at the bottom of a brook or lake.
We had
read that Mussulmen are permitted by the Koran to perform their
ablutions in sand when they cannot get water, a necessary
indulgence in Arabia, and we now understood the propriety of this
provision.
Plum Island, at the mouth of this river, to whose formation,
perhaps, these very banks have sent their contribution, is a
similar desert of drifting sand, of various colors, blown into
graceful curves by the wind. It is a mere sand-bar exposed,
stretching nine miles parallel to the coast, and, exclusive of
the marsh on the inside, rarely more than half a mile wide.
There are but half a dozen houses on it, and it is almost without
a tree, or a sod, or any green thing with which a countryman is
familiar. The thin vegetation stands half buried in sand, as in
drifting snow. The only shrub, the beach-plum, which gives the
island its name, grows but a few feet high; but this is so
abundant that parties of a hundred at once come from the
main-land and down the Merrimack, in September, pitch their
tents, and gather the plums, which are good to eat raw and to
preserve. The graceful and delicate beach-pea, too, grows
abundantly amid the sand, and several strange, moss-like and
succulent plants.
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