Praecocia

Praecocia! cried Pliny the Elder, spying several bowls of freshly picked apricots in the kitchen this morning.

What do you mean, praecocia? I asked. These are apricots.

Yes, yes, he said, but it was I who gave them the name praecocia, from which the word apricot derives. Praecocia, the Asiatic peach that ripens early, in summer. What a lot you have.

I know, I said. I am thinking of making Praecocia Jam, or maybe my favourite Praecocia Preserves, made with lemon juice and a few poisonous praecocia pits to add an intriguing taste of almonds.

Very good, said Pliny. Or you might like to try a favourite recipe of mine, well, of my friend Apicius, actually, whereby you cook the praecocia in honey, raisin wine and vinegar, and then , before thickening, add some pepper, mint and a little liquamen.

Liquamen? What's that again? I asked.

It's another name for garum, or fish sauce, he replied.

Pliny, I said, how about you make that, and I'll make the preserves? Meanwhile, would you like to eat a few fresh ones for breakfast?

No thankyou, that would doubtless upset my digestive system, said he.

Seals

Ridiculous! thunders Pliny the Elder! You have no business making pelicans talk, and read books! You will give Natural History a bad name. I hope you have something better to write about seals.

I feel sad now because the only thing I have to write about seals is that I saw a photo in the newspaper one day last week of two seals dancing together underwater. It was a black and white photo. The seals held their flippers around one another as though they were waltzing. They were in an aquarium somewhere and were proving very popular and being called Fred and Ginger. You couldn't tell from the photo which was Fred and which was Ginger. They were smiling. Their skin was covered in sticking plasters.

Perhaps they were not sticking plasters, but big square bubbles, I am not going back to have a look. The newspaper pile is in disorder, and due to be put out for recycling tonight.

Pliny the Elder won't like this.

The Pelicans

It was last Saturday. Pliny and Nostradamus were walking along the Linear Park trail beside the River Torrens. They sat down on a gritty slope under a gum tree overlooking a wooden landing on which two pelicans were preening. Both pelicans had large yellow tags on their backs half hidden under their white and black feathers. The pelicans were talking.

First Pelican: How did we get the name pelican, I wonder? Is it from billycan?

Second Pelican: No! Pelican comes from the Sanskrit word for axe.

First Pelican: Axe! Strike me down! Why?

Second Pelican: Because of the shape of our bills.

First Pelican: But our bills don't look anything like an axe!

Second Pelican: No, they don't. But humans are pretty unobservant. Did you know they used to believe we fed our young by piercing our own breasts with our bills and nourishing them with our blood? They probably just saw us feeding them regurgitated food from our bill pouches. They thought if our babies died we could revive them by bleeding on them as well. Yerk! Humans will swallow anything.

First Pelican: How do you know all this?

Second Pelican: It's in a book called Pelicanthology for Pelicans. Want to borrow it?

First Pelican: ( looking towards the weir ) Look! Our friends are coming!

Second Pelican: Yes, let's go!

And they hitched up their tail feathers and plopped ungracefully into the water. Splash ! Splash!

The Wondrous Blue

Well, said Pliny the Elder, there you have me at a disadvantage, as I never know what you are going to say.

That is a point well made, Pliny, said I, but you know, I never know what I am going to say either.

That does not surprise me, said Pliny the Elder.

But, I continued, that is not quite true today, for I have several topics lined up waiting to be explored. First, the interesting fact that at Port Noarlunga the other day I noticed an new shade of blue I'd never seen before, shimmering above the surface of the shallows.

And what are the other topics? asked Pliny the Elder.

Pliny! I cried. Pelicans if you must know, and possibly seals, but don't you want to know more about the wondrous shade of blue?

If it truly was wondrous, yes, he answered.

It was when I lifted up my sunglasses, I continued. I often do that at the seaside because my current sunglasses give everything a pinkish tint, in which it is all too easy to believe. I was astounded to see flat panes of blinding fluorescent blue on the surface of the shallow water in front of me. It was the exact blue of the sky, I realised at once, but until that day I had always perceived that same reflection as silver. If I tried I could still see it as silver. Or the colour of the sand underneath. But really it was this astonishing blue. I'm sure I never would have noticed it if my sunnies weren't tinted pink.

Wondrous, said Pliny. And the pelicans?

No Pliny, I said, I don't like to address more than one topic at a time. No one likes discursiveness.

Do they not? asked Pliny the Elder, looking doubtful.

Mastic

Pliny the Elder didn't come to Port Noarlunga, but he read my blog.

Pliny the Elder: You say the comb was stuck in mastic?

Me: Yes I did say that.

Pliny the Elder: Are you sure that's what it was?

Me: No.

Pliny the Elder: Well, I wish you'd brought it home. If it were truly mastic it would have been a most useful addition to your medicine chest, assuming you people nowadays have such things. Mastic is only produced on the Greek island of Chios, and was well known even in my day. It has many uses including cleaning the teeth and gums and freshening the breath, curing snake bite and ailments of the stomach, relieving burns and itching, and also flavouring bread, pastries, sugar paste, and meatballs.

Me: But Pliny, it had a metal comb stuck in it!

Pliny the Elder: That too could have been useful.

Me: Pliny! Why did I just KNOW you would say that?

Mrs Pammer's Comb

Today, Pliny and Nostradamus decided to take a picnic lunch to Port Noarlunga. It was 32 degrees and sunny.

After lunch they walked south along the beach. Twofold glass green waves rolled in, and spread like boiling sugar on the sand. Behind the reef in the middle distance rose white fountains of spume, while black waterfalls poured down in front. The cream, ochre and rust-coloured cliffs
towered under a blue sky. Below the cliffs, the river flowed fast towards the breaking surf.

As they were passing the surf lifesavers' tent, Nostradamus saw a strange object at the water's edge. He picked it up. It was a small black metal hair-trimming comb, with sharp blades, embedded in an ear-shaped lump of white mastic. The words " Mrs Pammer's" were stamped into the metal along the straight edge of the comb. Pliny and Nostradamus tried to guess how old it was. Three million years, said Nostradamus. Egyptian, said Pliny. Then Nostradamus threw it away.

On board a ship it would have been sensible to store a small sharp object by pressing it into a piece of something sticky, Pliny thought. It would have kept it safe, until they went and lost it.

The Snail and the Squid

A snail and a squid were disputing as to which of them produced the finest dye.

" My brilliant blue is desired by all men", boasted the snail.

"Yes", replied the squid, but my black ink is useful for avoiding predators. Furthermore I need not be crushed for men to extract it."

Just then a man came by and spied the two creatures talking.

" Aha!" he exclaimed, " The very type of squid I was seeking! I need you for my experimental blue dye pot!"

And he picked up the squid, leaving the snail to live another day.

The moral of the story is: There is no avoiding fate when the dye is cast.

The Lost Chilazon

Pliny the Elder is laughing at this.

In the 19th century, the Radzyner Rebbe set out on an expedition to find the lost Chilazon. This was a creature from which traditionally the famous Biblical blue dye ( the Tekhelet) had been made in ancient times. The Rebbe thought that a certain squid fitted the description of the Chilazon. Unable to produce the dye himself, he sought the help of an Italian chemist, who showed him how to apply intense heat to a mixture of potash, iron filings and squid ink. Two years later, 10,000 of the Rebbe's followers were wearing blue threads on their tsitsits.

In 1913, Rabbi Herzog, the Chief Rabbi of Ireland, sent samples of the dye to chemists for analysis. The dye was found to be inorganic, synthetically made Prussian Blue. He was informed that virtually any organic substance mixed with iron filings and potash, and subjected to great heat, would produce the same blue dye. The Radzyner Rebbe had been misled by an unscrupulous chemist!

Pliny the Elder thinks this story is hilarious. If only the Rebbe had consulted my works, he says, he would have learned that the Chilazon he sought was not a squid at all, but a snail, the well-known Murex Trunculus!

Squidography - The Killer Humboldt Squid

Pliny loves Facebook. Where else would Pliny learn that just one hour earlier C**** was in a hotel room in Dublin watching a show about Killer Humboldt Squid? Killer Humboldt Squid! At first Pliny thought C**** must have been watching a very scary film. But no, he had called it a show. That meant it was a documentary. That meant there really was such a creature. So Pliny googled the Killer Humboldt Squid.

Pliny learned that the Killer Humboldt Squid is large, aggressive, raptorial, cannibalistic, with three hearts, stereoscopic eyes, blue blood, a large brain, lightning-fast hook-laden tentacles, eight squirming arms, a disproportionately large razorsharp parrot-like beak, and lives mainly in the deeper blacker, colder lower oxygen regions of the Humboldt Current that sweeps up the east coast of the United States. There are millions and squillions of them. Sometimes they lacerate fishermen and divers.

No wonder then that C**** was sufficiently impressed to sufficiently impress Pliny to google the Killer Humboldt Squid.

Squiddity

Pliny and Nostradamus went to Semaphore yesterday and walked along the shore towards Largs. The beach was surprisingly empty except for some people. There were seagulls, standing as though placed by a random generator of seagulls, amongst stringballs and tumble weeds, placed by a random generator of beach detritus. There was one large orange starfish spreadeagled on the sand, expiring. Pliny and Nostradamus each unknown to the other counted its seven arms. There were seven.

The sand was rippled in a most uncomfortable and rippley way, it was like walking over corrugated iron. If you took care to place your foot so that the high point of the ripple sat comfortably between the row of your toes and the ball of your foot you could be sure that a second uncomfortable ridge would be just exactly under your heel. This would cause you to hobble in a most unsatisfactory way. Pliny and Nostradamus turned back after a while of this.

And so it was, thought Pliny, that we didn't pass Joe's Kiosk, where Senator Nick Xenophon had recently been photographed wrestling with a squid. Pliny was wrong in this, because they were walking towards Largs, not Henley, or Grange. But Pliny was thinking of squid for a reason.

Revelations of an Ancient

Pliny the Elder read my blog! Why didn't I think that would happen?

Anyway, he wasn't too upset. He liked the fishy evidence. "Ah bogues!" he reminisced, "how we used to love them. And to think the fish sauce proved the date of the eruption. Of course my nephew wouldn't get it wrong. He was very fond of me. I died in it, you recall?"

I said that yes I did recall, but how on earth did he?

He looked wise, and didn't answer.

Then he said, "That trick coin Titus minted early! I wondered where it went....."

Fishy Evidence

Shall I tell Pliny the Elder what I have just found out? That there has been some debate recently about the date of the eruption of Vesuvius that finished him off?

Pliny the Younger, his nephew, says it was August 24th, 79AD, but a coin has been found at the site that was minted in October 79AD, although it is in poor condition and therefore not good dating evidence.

Fish sauce has recently helped to confirm the date given by Pliny the Younger. It seems a batch of fish sauce that had just been left to macerate was frozen in time by the ash. The fish it was made of ( called bogues ) are abundant in July and early August. Roman recipes recommend leaving the fish sauce mixture to macerate no longer than a month.

Pliny would love the fishy evidence. He would not like that his nephew's word was doubted. Nor would he like to be reminded of his final day.

He has a tummy ache today, too.

I'm not going to tell him.

What is XO Sauce?

Pliny the Elder: You have received some exotic gifts. What is XO Sauce?

Me: It's a spicy fish sauce very popular in Hong Kong. It's called XO after 'Extra Old' Cognac, which is not one of the ingredients, but makes it sound posh.

Pliny the Elder: What are the ingredients of this delicacy?

Me: According to Li Feng's hand written label: Scallops, Prawns, Mushrooms, Some Garlics, Onions, Chillis, Vegetable Oil and Salt a Little.

Pliny the Elder: Very nice. I used to like fish sauce back in the old days. We Romans made a good one with anchovies, herbs and salt, called garum. We used to put it on everything. It smelled terrible but we couldn't get enough of it. We used it as an unguent for wounds as well.....

Me: Really, how fascinating. Would you like a Green Tea biscuit?

Pliny the Elder: Well, only if you're going to open the XO Sauce. Have you got a knife?

The Possibility of Reciprocity

Pliny received many gifts from Li Feng yesterday, in honour of Christmas.

1) A violet and navy track suit. The top is short-sleeved with 4 tartan-patterned diamond shapes across the front. Each diamond is crossed with gold embroidery. There are 3 gold roses in between the 4 diamonds. Under the diamonds are the words Fiscsos Ladies Sportswear also in gold. The pants are ankle freezers. In this track suit, Pliny looks like a golfer.

2) A packet of Green Tea biscuits.

3) Two Japanese teabags, 2 Irish teabags, 2 Aik Cheong Malaysian Coffee Mixture bags, and a small container of mystery Chinese tea with no English writing.

4) A jar of gherkins with one gherkin missing, eaten by Li Feng, who didn't like it.

5) A foil-wrapped roll of sugarless Christmas pudding.

6) A plastic container of dried oregano from Li Feng's Italian neighbour's garden.

7) Some freshly made XO Sauce, in a honey jar.

Pliny likes Li Feng's presents, and is wondering how she can possibly reciprocate, next week.

The Dog, the Mice and the Cheese

Pliny and her mum went Christmas shopping last Friday, although they didn't need to. They had already bought all their Christmas presents except for the one that you could only buy in Bunnings.

I want to buy a special Christmas card for W**** and C****, said Pliny's mum. I think they will need cheering up.

Oh, said Pliny, and why is that?

Because of McEwen's leg, said Pliny's mum.

They looked for a cheery sort of Christmas card that would take W**** and C****'s minds off their dog's leg.

Pliny liked one which showed a mouse holding his Christmas present up to his nose and saying "I bet it's cheese."

Pliny's mum liked the one with Three Wise Mice bringing presents of Cheddar, Stilton and Gorgonzola to a cute little baby Jeesmouse. She thought it was funnier. She thought it would definitely cheer them up.

Pliny thought that now she came to think about it she needed cheering up as well. She began to hope that she too would receive a special card at Christmas from her mum.

Sizzling and Running, Not Whistling and Erupting

One of Aesop's more enigmatic fables is about snails. A farmer's boy is gathering snails. When he has two hands full he lights a fire and throws them on, for he intends to eat them. The snails draw back inside their shells and begin to sizzle in the way snails do when heated. " You abandoned creatures!" cries the boy. " How can you whistle while your houses burn?"

What can be the moral of this story?

The farmer's boy learns nothing. The snails learn nothing, for presumably they are already dead when the farmer's boy asks his cruel and foolish question. So it must be we who are to learn something.

Last night Pliny and Nostradamus were at Pliny's mum's, watching a documentary about the last days of Pompeii. Pliny thought she heard a heard the sound of plumbing. She though it might be coming from next door. Five minutes later she could still hear it, in the quiet bits. "Can you hear something like running water?" she asked. Pliny's mum did not reply, because she only had one of her hearing aids in. Nostradamus said," It's probably the sound of the volcano." Pliny didn't think so. After all who would know better than Pliny what that sounds like? She got up and went into the bathroom, where she discovered that her mum had left the hot tap running. " It was the tap," she said, earning a certain amount of admiration and gratitude.

Now the moral of both these stories is, I think, the same: People think kindly of those who are able to identify the proper meaning of a sound.

The Many Ex-Uses of Snails

Pliny the Elder: It is calamitous that your snails are disappearing. Snails are medicinal wonders of the natural world. If you read my works this is made plain.

Me: Oh dear. What are they good for?

Pliny the Elder: Google me and see.

Me: You lazy old Roman. Alright.......
( Later ) You say they increase the speed of delivery. Are you kidding?

Pliny the Elder: What do you think I'm talking about?

Me: I don't know. The mail?

Pliny the Elder: Fool! I'm talking about childbirth! A nice drink of snails and whoosh, Bob's your nephew.

Me: Wish I'd known about that years ago.

Pliny the Elder: Indeed. And furthermore, reduced to a pulp, snails may be used to treat burns, abscesses, and other wounds. Boiled and grilled over a fire and eaten with wine, they will reduce stomach pains. He who spits up blood will feel better if he drinks snails. They are good too for vertigo, fainting, and fits of madness.

Me: Oh yes, and it says here you should mix the snails with donkey milk.

Pliny the Elder: It would not surprise me if that too, these days, is hard to find.

Reporting the Snail

Pliny the Elder disapproves of my recent blogs. I have been lowering the tone, he says. There are better things to write about than putative yellow phalluses and better subjects for poems than his cure for constipation. Write about something instructive, he says.

Well, Pliny, I am going to. Today my subject is the snail. Yesterday Nostradamus and I went for an evening walk after the rain. The road was lined with puddles and fallen jacaranda flowers. The sky was full of dark clouds. Droplets dripped from the trees.

All at once I was astonished to see a snail on the road. I hadn't seen a snail for over a year. Until that moment I had forgotten that I hadn't. I looked for more snails. But there was only one snail on Avonmore Avenue.

I wondered if I should report the snail. People have been asked recently to report possums. I decided I should.

Little Person

Some weeks ago a Little Person fell into our garden. I assumed she'd come from next door so I placed her on top of the fence hoping that Christine would claim her. But Christine didn't.

After a week on the fence the Little Person fell down into our garden again, pushed by Christine or the wind.

I placed the Little Person on the outdoor table near the back door. She is still there. How she irritates me.

She is five centimetres tall, rather squat, with short black curly hair and brown skin. She is wearing a red baseball cap turned sideways, a short blue skirt, a green jumper and white shoes. Along the side of her left shoe are the words Little People. Her arms are raised. She carries a yellow toy aeroplane in her left hand and a big red and yellow paintbrush in her right. On her back is a large yellow backpack with yellow straps.

It is intriguing that she carries a plane and a paintbrush. That isn't what irritates me. It's the contents of her backpack.

Protruding, from her backpack are three long yellow objects. They do not look like bananas. You can't see the bottoms but the middles are fat with little folds, while the tops are rounded and even fatter. They are not icecreams. No one carries icecreams in a backpack. Each of the yellow objects is tipped with a purple spot. They look a bit like rockets. They look even more like giant yellow penises.

You can see why I'm irritated. I swear I won't throw the Little Person away until I figure out what those things are meant to be.

Three Bites at the Oyster

THE LITTLE OYSTER
I am a little oyster
All white and grey and pink
And full of good nutrition
I have heard that people think
With fifty nine trace elements
And quite a lot of zinc
I'm just a little oyster though
And don't care what they think.

DIVINE WELLNESS
"Hello dear, I'm calling up to find out where you are!"
"Oh! I'm just about to get into this oyster-bed-cum-spa,
It's meant to be relaxing and healthgiving; yes, bizarre!
And you get two dozen oysters and free access to the bar!"

FOR PLINY
The learned Elder Pliny knew
When constipated what to do
The following treatment worked just fine:
Oysters boiled in honey wine.

Sorry Pliny for putting that in
It has more gravitas in Latin.

Sadness of the Unenlightened Oyster

Pliny the Elder has presented me with a poem about Oyster Therapy:


Ostreae aquam dulcem fluvium amant
Parvae et rarae in mare
Optime in luce aestatis crescent
Non illuminatae lente tristitiae

This translates as:

Oysters love the fresh water of streams falling into the sea
In the open sea they are small and rare
They grow best in the summer where sunlight reaches them
If they cannot be reached by the sun's rays they grow slowly
And eat very little for sadness.

( Isn't Latin wonderfully concise !)


Thanks, Pliny, I will write you one tomorrow.

Oyster Therapy

Pliny is on a bus, facing the back. Her legs are sticking out into the aisle. She sees her socks and thinks that yellow and orange stripes don't go well with purple grey and blue. It is too late to do anything about this though. She looks out of the window at the shops passing by.

The bus stops. Pliny sees a shop called Divine Wellness, offering Pure Oyster Therapy. Pliny looks again. It isn't Pure Oyster Therapy, but Pure Oxygen Therapy. Pliny blames her eyes, and a careless way of reading.

She thinks she would prefer Oyster Therapy any day.

Sine Curve

Neither Pliny the Elder nor I will be buying any graph paper. We are in full accord over the Moon. Pliny's graph, which he has been plotting assiduously over the last twenty seven days, has turned into a heartbreakingly beautiful sine curve. It doesn't matter that Pliny's squares are rectangles, the sine curve is undeniable.

Now the Plinies have remembered their maths lessons from school. Not exactly, but sort of. And they agree that it makes sense that the moon appears to change more slowly the more or less of it you can see. They would also probably agree to the exact opposite if someone were to point out that the sine curve was telling them that. They don't fully get it, you see. But they love their beautiful sine curve, a remarkable phenomenon of nature.

Nostradamus, who knows about such things, told us weeks ago it would turn out to be a sine curve.

So the Moon Gadget is redeemed, or would be but for this. The Moon Gadget was set for the Northern Hemisphere, until last week, when I discovered how to set it to the Southern Hemisphere with a simple click. This reversed the bright side of the moon in my Moon Gadget so that it matched what I see in the sky. Nostradamus is currently in dispute with the Moon Gadget over this reversal. On an evening walk he demonstrated to me that no matter which hemisphere we were it the moon should look the same.

Confounded Travels

Pliny and Nostradamus walked to Officeworks this morning to buy an expandable folder. A sheeny white moth crossed the path from left to right in front of them, looking a little frazzled. There were people in colourful clothing sitting at the bus stop over the road.

A woman with a brokendown car was standing at the narrow gravelled gap to the Officeworks carpark, talking to someone on her phone. Pliny and Nostradamus were irritated. They had to walk round her. Inside the shop they looked for the right sort of folder.


They chose one that they thought would do the job. But they had no cash so they had to buy more items. They bought a giant envelope, some Blutack, a Baby Einstein counting book. They paid by eftpos.


On the way home they noticed that the colourfully dressed people were still waiting at the bus stop, and there was no bus in sight.

This reminded Nostradamus that he and Pliny had to go and visit Pliny's mum in the afternoon.

Easy Mo Bee

Pliny the Elder saw me reading Aesop's Fables. These tales are meant to be heard, not read out of a book, said he. They are oral tales. That is all very well, said I, but I have borrowed this book from the library.

Perhaps you could google up a site where someone speaks the stories, he suggested helpfully.

So I found a site and listened to several of the fables read by a child who did not read very well. Not all the fables could be listened to. I decided to give up on the child and read Jupiter and the Bee.

It was exactly the same story as the one in my library book. The Bee brings Jupiter some honey. Jupiter is pleased and offers a reward. The Bee asks for a sting to kill men who want to steal its honey. Jupiter is angry, and grants the sting, with the proviso that if the Bee uses the sting it will die. A good story. I suppose the moral is: Always ask for nice things.

But the moral of my story is yet to come. You can double click on any word in the fable you are reading and you will get an instant link to a site called ANSWER, which will tell you the meaning of the word. You can double click on Jupiter for instance, and learn that he is a God. I clicked on Bee. Imagine my surprise when I learned that Bee was a famous New York rapper, whose full name was Easy Mo Bee. I passed this on to Pliny who shook his head in disbelief.

The moral of this story is : The path to enlightenment is littered with red herrings.

Immensely Flat

Pliny the Elder: Far be it from me to dispute with anybody over their use of English, but don't you think 'immensely flat' is a rather inappropriate epithet for a small moth that turned out to be a lick of paint?

Me: What, you don't believe it was very flat?

Pliny the Elder: I do indeed. I am not disputing the adjective 'flat', but the adverb 'immensely'.

Me: Why?

Pliny the Elder: Because, my dear, it implies great size, and your moth, as you say, was very small.

Me: I meant that its flatness was immeasurable, not that it was of great size.

Pliny the Elder: Well now, tell me the truth, are you still happy with 'immensely flat'?

Me: Not indisputably.

Pliny the Elder: Then I am immensely flattered.

Flat Black Moth

Pliny and Nostradamus were on their way home from a lecture at the SA Museum. They stopped off to order a pizza from Domino's on the way home. It would be ready in twenty minutes.

Crikey, but Pliny needed a pee! Luckily the public toilets over the road at Firle Plaza were still open.

While she was washing her hands she saw on the yellow painted wall to her left a small black moth. She looked at it closely. It was immensely flat. But Pliny knew that moths sometimes looked immensely flat. She leaned in even closer so that she was looking at it from the side insofar as that was possible, given the wall. It couldn't have been flatter.

She touched it lightly with the tip of her finger expecting it to flutter away. It didn't budge. It didn't feel like a moth either. It felt like wall. Pliny touched it again. It was just a splot of black paint in the shape of the wings of a moth. Pliny was disappointed.

But to this day she still remembers it as a moth.

Every Australian Bird Illustrated

The pair of birds we saw at Goolwa
on the weekend were
Sooty Oystercatchers that
live in that sort of habitat.

Now we know that these birds look
just like they ought to look,
and now we know that they behave
the way they did behave.
They lay their eggs
just like the egg
that I saw in the sand.

That egg will be deserted
Since I touched it with my hand.

Three Hats

The following morning they went for a walk on Goolwa Beach. There was a strong breeze and they followed it, wearing three hats between them.

Pliny saw many wondrous items that had been thrown up on the shore. Orange peel sponges and mandarin skins, giant polished beetle polyps, fans traced on the sand by wind with a seaweed pen, scarlet and purple striped sea urchins with white stitched borders and toothless holes, spherical balls of fine weedstring, and long ones shaped like turds.

Turning back into the wind they were faced with low streams of fine dry sand passing between their legs like time lapsed clouds. It was quite unpleasant.