realism

dry as touchwood, and wasting into dust.
Within the ship lay the bones of a man, stretched out as though he had died in sleep. Outside the ship lay the bones of two others.
Neither was there any water, save where in the hollows of some of the boulders rain had lodged and had not yet been drunk up by the sun. No living creature, great or
small, lived in that ghyll.
"What," sighed one,
"If this were the Earthly Paradise, and yon the Tree of Life!" But the
others murmured and would not have it so. Yet to the sick man even this
Isle of the Stones of Emptiness was a place of rest and respite from the
sea,--"It is still mother-earth," he said, "though the mother be grown
very old"