Lawsuits, as we hear, have in some cases grown out of these causes.
Railroads have been made through certain irritable districts,
breaking their sod, and so have set the sand to blowing, till it
has converted fertile farms into deserts, and the company has had
to pay the damages.
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.
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