(The ominously rising breeze, the horrid realisation that the low strip of dark cloud on the horizon is actually an onrushing wall of water hundreds of feet high.) Treasure hunters, especially, must all have entertained the fancy of strolling offshore among the wrecks and hulks drying in the sunshine, scattered as far as the eye can reach. The image is likely to be sanitised, based on pictures of stranded fishing boats canted over in the deserts of Kazakhstan where the retreating waters of the ruined Aral Sea have left them. The reality would be one of draped and stenching putrefaction. Wrecks have a particular fascination because they act as foci for so many preoccupations: death, loss, things being hidden and disappearing, things being discovered and reappearing, hoards of wealth. Irony is added in that wrecks and their contents are frequently quite close to their searchers. They may be no more than a few hundred feet away but the marine universe into which they have passed makes them as inaccessible as if they were miles distant or on the Moon.
