Extract: THE HOUSE OF CARNE If by any chance you should ever sail on a low ebb-tide along a certain western coast, you will, if you are of a receptive humour and new to the district, receive a somewhat startling impression of the dignity of the absolutely flat. Your ideas of militant and resistant grandeur may have been associated hitherto with the iron frontlets and crashing thunders of Finisterre or Sark, of Cornwall or the Western Isle. Here you are faced with a repressive curbing of the waters, equal in every respect to theirs, but so quietly displayed as to be somewhat awesome, as mighty power in restraint must always be. As far as eye can reach--sand, nothing but sand, overpowering by reason of its immensity, a very Sahara of the coast. Mighty levels stretching landward and seaward--for you are only threading a capricious channel among the banks which the equinoctials will twist at their pleasure, and away to the west the great grim sea lies growling in his sandy chains until his time comes. Then, indeed, he will swell and boil and seethe in his channels till he is full ready, and come creeping silently over his barriers, and then--up and away over the flats with the speed of a racehorse, and death to the unwary. You may see the humping back of him among the outer banks if you climb a few feet up your mast. Then, if you turn towards the land, you will see, far away across the brown ribbed flats, a long rim of yellow sand backed by bewildering ranges of low white hummocks, and farther away still a filmy blue line of distant hills. Here and there a fisherman's cottage accentuates the loneliness of it all. At one point, as the sun dips in the west, a blaze of light flashes out as though a hidden battery had suddenly unmasked itself; and if you ask your skipper what it is, he will tell you that is Carne. Then, if he is a wise man, he will upsail and away, to make Wytham or Wynsloe before it is dark, for the shifting banks off Carne are as hungry as Death, and as tricky as the devil.
About the Author: English novelist and poet John Oxenham was born William Arthur Dunkerley in Manchester, England, in 1852. His entry into the literary world was not as a writer but as a publisher; with several partners he started the publication "The Idler", and later on the weekly "To-Day". He traveled extensively in Europe, Canada and the US as part of his publishing duties, but eventually decided he wanted to be a writer more than he did a publisher, and in 1913 he finished "Bees in Amber". However, his publisher would not spend a penny promoting it, and even asked that he limit the book to no more than 200 copies, as they knew they could not sell that many. He eventually printed the book at his own expense; it wound up selling almost 300,000 copies. During World War I he self-published several volumes of poetry, and together they sold over a million copies. He also wrote a song called "Hymn for the Men at the Front" that eventually sold more than 8,000,000 copies. Altogether he has published more than 40 novels, poetry books and essays. He died on January 23, 1941, in Worthing, England.