"It is an extraordinary thing to watch the sand come to life if one happens to be wading where there is a large colony of the [mole] crabs.  One moment it may seem uninhabited.  Then, in that fleeting instant when the water of a receding wave flows seaward like a thin stream of liquid glass, there are suddenly hundreds of little gnome-like faces peering through the sandy floor-beady-eyed, long-whiskered faces set in bodies so nearly the color of their background that they can barely be seen.  And when, almost instantly, the faces fade back into invisibility, as though a host of strange little troglodytes had momentarily looked out through the curtains of their hidden world and as abruptly retired within it, the illusion is strong that one has seen nothing except in imagination—that there was merely an apparition induced by the magical quality of this world of shifting sand and foaming water.” —from Rachel Carson in The Edge of the Sea, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1955, 1983, pp. 154-155