She heard a ripping noise behind her and turned around to look to the south, toward the dent in the beach, several miles distant, that formed the harbor of Scheveningen. The last time she'd looked back, a few minutes ago, there had been nothing between her and the anchorage but a few clam-diggers. But now there was a sail on the sand: a triangle of canvas, stretched drum-tight by the wet wind off the sea. Below it hovered a spidery rig of timbers with spoked wagon-wheels at their ends. One wheel was suspended in the air by the heeling of the vehicle. Taken together with the speed of its progress up the beach, this created the impression that it was flying. The wheel spun slowly in the air, dripping clots of wet sand from its rim, which was very wide so that it rolled over, instead of cutting into, the sand and its gay mosaic of cockle shells. The opposite wheel was scribing a long fat track down the beach, slaloming between the dark hunched forms of the diggers; though, a hundred yards in its wake, this trace had already been erased by the waves.