Kara Kum features

Usage examples of dunes.

A unique scene, representative of the many colorful situations that youthful friendship could involve in a rural district amid the unchanging embodiments of country life -- peasant, farmhand, pastor, schoolmaster, postmaster, peddler, cheesemaker, dairy co-operative inspector, apprentice forester, and village idiot -- perpetuated itself for many years without being photographed: somewhere in the dunes, with his back to the woods and their aisles, Amsel is at work.

For a long while the cloud over the lazy river found no rest: for a time it hovered over Bohnsack, for a time it hung long and narrow over the woods and dunes, then broad and fluid over the opposite shore, dropping an old crow into a marshy meadow, where it stood out gray and stiff.

Kriwe the ferryman -- the ferry had stopped for the day -- took the Schiewenhorst village mayor with red-and-white-checked daughter to the edge of the woods where Eduard Amsel, guarded as usual by his friend Walter Matern and the dog Senta, had lined up six or seven of his most recent creations against the steeply rising wooded dunes, but not in military formation.

Behind the dunes, barren and fertile land was topped with the same snow.

And while they entered four carriages and glided away toward the dunes, it began to burn from the inside outward.

The friendly seaside resort -- where sea baths were taken as early as 1823 -- with its low-lying fishing village and dome-surmounted casino, its medium-high dunes and scrub pine forest, with its fishing boats, its hundred and fifty feet of pier, and its tripartite bathhouse, with the watch-tower of the German Lifesaving Society, was situated exactly halfway between Neufahrwasser and Glettkau on the shores of the Gulf of Danzig.

Putting some distance between herself and the horror in the dunes calmed her.

From her third floor vantage point, she could see over the grassy dunes to the ocean.

It revealed blurry though unmistakable facial features--the tip of a nose, the faint outline of a mouth, the curve of a chin--removing any doubt that a person had been hiding in the dunes just before Dana made her awful discovery.

While that had been difficult to do, as so many of the dunes looked alike, she had managed to pick out a place that appeared to be the one.

Dana carefully scrutinized each face, to see if it could belong to their mysterious person in the dunes, but no one looked familiar.

Their search of the dunes had turned up a couple of footprints, but that was all.

Dana pulled the photo of the man in the dunes from her briefcase and handed it to Jake.

Gazing at the dunes reminded Dana of chasing the mysterious man the other time they had visited this spot.

Someone with a rifle could be hiding in the dunes at this very moment.