The Vultures by Henry Seton Merriman — Read

A muddy sea and a dirty gray sky, a cold rain and a moaning wind. Short-capped waves breaking to leeward in a little hiss of spray. The water itself sandy and discolored. Far away to the east, where the green-gray and the dirty gray merge into one, a windmill spinning in the breeze -- Holland. Near at hand, standing in the sea, the picture of wet and disconsolate solitude, a little beacon, erect on three legs, like a bandbox affixed to a giant easel. It is alight, although it is broad daylight; for it is always alight, always gravely revolving, night and day, alone on this sandbank in the North Sea. It is tended once in three weeks. The lamp is filled; the wick is trimmed; the screen, which is ingeniously made to revolve by the heat of the lamp, is lubricated, and the beacon is left to its solitude and its work.

There must be land to the eastward, though nothing but the spinning mill is visible. The land is below the level of the sea. There is probably an entrance to some canal behind the moving sandbank. This is one of the waste-places of the world -- a place left clean on sailors' charts; no one passes that way. These banks are as deadly as many rocks which have earned for themselves a dreaded name in maritime story. For they never relinquish anything that touches them. They are soft and gentle in their embrace; they slowly suck in the ship that comes within their grasp. Their story is a long, grim tale of disaster. Their treasure is vast and stored beneath a weight, half sand, half water, which must ever baffle the ingenuity of man. Fog, the sailors' deadliest foe, has its home on these waters, rising on the low-lying lands and creeping out to sea, where it blows to and fro for weeks and weeks together. When all the world is blue and sunny, fog-banks lie like a sheet of cotton-wool on these coasts.