It's where your former engineers found such a morass of the shifty stuff that they declared the Man-killer never could have its appetite satisfied with dirt.

There was a good log and concrete foundation laid down there, and for thirty-six hours the sand had not shifted a particle as far as the eye could discover.

Now, look at it!" Before them the top layer of desert sand had sunk away, revealing a well or sink, one hundred and fifty feet across and the bottom at least forty feet below the general level.
"I always wondered why a suspension bridge wouldn't solve the problem more easily and cheaply than any other construction," muttered Mr.
Ellsworth, after he had gotten over his first indignation.
"To avoid every possibility of lurking quicksand the suspension bridge would have to be more than a mile long," Reade answered.

"Beyond, there are other treacherous little patches of quicksand.

It would cost the road millions to put up a suspension bridge that would hold.
"A short bridge would look all right and doubtless serve all right, for a while.