Flotsam and Jetsam Objects from various beaches, sent to the Chambers of Cartography and Revealed Menace for mapping. WESTERN BEACH. - colection of tiny particles so multitudinous and varied that they defy description or generalisation: some pale, some dark, some russet- honey- or blood-coloured, some evidently the remains of shells but most refusing to reveal their origins if indeed they have any - known collectively as SAND. I have isolated one particle with a black speck which seemed somehow important. You may want to pay particular attention to this one. - one heavy object - a STONE - with six sides, eight if you count the two sloping walls of the chip knocked out of the longest side. Surface smooth and cold: interior unknown. Smells of dry air and salt. Has a flat taste. - one decrepit SOCK, black, wet, weighty, ragged. - DEAD BODY of a crow, in bad shape for a bird but good shape for a corpse, being thoroughly dead. (twisted neck, head on backwards, eyes gone, lax white skin wrinkled between the feathers and many feathers missing. Nails broken, one toe gone, legs otherwise intact; scab on left ankle, hopping insects in belly.) Loose weight. Small, sour smell; pearly taste. - LOOSE CLUMP of fine red hair, very beautiful, actually seaweed, with a raw, piercing, sad smell like an empty room after a storm. NORTHERN BEACH. - a broken ROD of coral, nubby and dirty, pallid, pitted, with a grainy surface at one end. - large wooden BOLUS (from the fisherpeoples' hauling mechanism?) One hemisphere has been baked dry; the other is slimy and stuck about with sand. One small, deep crack, curved like a fingernail, is wrapped around the dry hemisphere. - white, whorled DISC, a shell worn down to a button. In the past it was a shell, in the future it will be a tiny bead about the size of a bean, and then a grain of sand in the eye of a fish. Please take it into your institute and spare it this fate. EASTERN BEACH. - knot of grey hair - irregularly-shaped object (smooth surface, brightly reflective) with four blunted spines at one end and a gently indented surface at the other; slightly curved sides, the whole is shaped somewhere between a rectangular cube and a cylinder - ultimately able to be labelled A TOOTH. - long, twisted cylinder, knuckled, sporting a bare, pale surface marked with wheeling canyons, pits and scars, carbuncles and creases, which send the closely observing eye hurtling down its narrow landscape - a very frightening experience. A STICK. - a powerful SMELL with no source. SOUTHERN BEACH. - clumps of loose roots, leaves, pods, fibrous cups, long tough hairs, segmented vines, slimy vines and mildewed vines, fruit pips weathered like sailors, the secret cores of fruit bared to the sun. - a LIGHT which shines in my eye, unpleasant and traceable to the SUN.