They did not, and I was just turning away disconsolate when my eye caught, ascending from behind the next bluff down the beach, a thin strand of smoke rising into the morning air.
It was nothing so much in itself--a thin spiral creeping upwards mast-high, then flattening out into a mushroom head--but it meant everything to me.

Where there was fire there must be humanity, and where there was humanity--ay, to the very outlayers of the universe--there must be breakfast.

It was a splendid thought; I rushed down the hillock and went gaily for that blue thread amongst the reeds.
It was not two hundred yards away, and soon below me was a tiny bay with bluest water frilling a silver beach, and in the midst of it a fire on a hearth dancing round a pot that simmered gloriously.

But of an owner there was nothing to be seen.

I peered here and there on the shore, but nothing moved, while out to sea the water was shining like molten metal with not a dot upon it!--what did it matter?
I laughed as, pleased and hungry, I slipped down the bank and strode across the sands; it pleased Fate to play bandy with me, and if it sent me supperless to bed, why, here was restitution in the way of breakfast.
I took up a morsel of the stuff in the kettle on a handy stick and found it good--indeed, I knew it at once as a very dainty mess made from the roots of a herb the Martians greatly liked; An had piled my platter with it when we supped that night in the market-place of Seth, and the sweet white stuff had melted into my corporal essence, it seemed, without any gross intermediate process of digestion.