"To anyone that loves the seas of Britain or the great sands of Belgium and Holland, there is something faintly repulsive about the tideless Mediterranean and Aegean, which on a calm day tend to be at once stagnant and a little uncanny. Dense weed often clogs the shallows, uncleaned by ebb and flow; and one speculates upon fathom five and millennia many of unshifting spoil."

Robert Aickman, "The Wine-Dark Sea."