In our time, there is not anywhere a tract more purely of tumbled sand, than all this between Kunersdorf and Dam Vorstadt; and you judge, without aid of record or tradition, that it is greatly altered for the worse since Friedrich's time,--some rabbit-colony, or other the like insignificancy, eating out the roots, till all vegetation died, and the wind got hold and set it dancing;--and that, in 1759, when Russian human beings took it for a Camp, it must have been at least coherent, more or less; covered, held together by some film of scrubby vegetation; not blowing about in every wind as now! Kunersdorf stands with its northern end pushed into that KUHGRUND (Cow-Hollow); which must then have been a grassy place.

Eastward of Kunersdorf the ground has still some skin of peat, and sticks together: but westward, all that three miles, it is a mere tumult of sand-hills, tumbled about in every direction (so diligent have the conies been, and then the winds); no gullet, or definite cut or hollow, now traceable anywhere, but only an endless imbroglio of twisted sand-heaps and sand-hollows, which continually alter in the wind-storms.
Sand wholly, and--except the strong paved Highway that now runs through it (to Reppen, Meseritz and the Polish Frontier, and is strongly paved till it get through Kunersdorf)--chaotic wholly; a scene of heaped barrenness and horror, not to be matched but in Sahara; the features of the Battle quite blown away, and indecipherable in our time.
"A hundred years ago, it would have some tattered skin,--of peat, of heather and dwarf whins, with the sand cropping out only here and there.
So one has to figure it in Soltikof's day,--before the conies ruined it.

Which was not till within the last sixty years, as appears.

Kriele's Book (in 1801) still gives no hint of change: the KUHGRUND, which now has nothing but dry sand for the most industrious ruminant, is still a place of succulence and herbage in Kriele's time; 'Deep Way,' where 'at one point two carts could not pass,' was not yet blown out of existence, but has still 'a Well in it' for Kriele; HOHLE GRUND (since called Loudon's Hollow), with the Jew Hill and Jew Churchyard beyond, seem tolerable enough places to Kriele.

Probably not unlike what the surrounding Country still is.