He slept in the dunes where the ribbon of sand seemed at its thinnest, not even a hundred yards wide, and he felt an unusual claustrophobia after nightfall when the vastness of both sea and sound were swallowed by a darkness immune to human measurement. He was glad to be out of the wind, though, and eventually the claustrophobia passed and instead with the stars and the water’s constant roar came a sense that everyone on earth was irrelevant, that if the world were emptied of people tomorrow they would not be missed at all, not by bird nor beast, or God up in heaven or the devil down in hell.
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