The darkness of the sensory language surrounding the Shivering Sand in Period 1 Chapter 4 is a literal version of the gloomy mass of contradictory facts, dark truths, and hidden evidence in The Moonstone. Rosanna uses hyperbolic language and provocative alliteration to describe the Sand. Her intense descriptions of it also foreshadows her own death within its depths. When Rosanna and Betteredge stand looking over the Sand together in Chapter 4, Betteredge says:
I looked where she pointed. The tide was on the turn, and the horrid sand began to shiver. The broad brown face of it heaved slowly, and then dimpled and quivered all over. ‘Do you know what it looks like to me?’ says Rosanna, catching me by the shoulder again. ‘It looks as if it had hundreds of suffocating people under it – all struggling to get to the surface, and all sinking lower and lower in the dreadful deeps! Throw a stone in, Mr Betteredge! Throw a stone in, and let’s see the sand suck it down!’
In this passage, Rosanna uses the diction of suffering and suffocation to give the reader a bold visual image of her fear of the Sand. She imagines it to be full of "hundreds of suffocating people" below the surface, and although this is hyperbolic, the quicksand itself does eventually prove to contain "suffering." It hides evidence from the people investigating the theft of the Moonstone, and it is associated with secrets, pain, and strife by every narrator.
When people describe the Sand, as Rosanna does here, it is linked to the visual language of obscurity and loss: it has "dreadful deeps" like grief and is "horrible" to look at as it shivers like a person in terror. The language of pointless struggle in Rosanna's descriptions also provokes a sense of hopelessness and despair for the reader, as she describes people "sinking lower and lower" into the muck. The alliteration of "Throw a stone in, and let’s see the sand suck it down!" also provides the reader with auditory imagery: the sucking "s" sounds in this phrase echo the plop and sink of a stone into the quicksand. All of this obsessive, gloomy talk foreshadows the later point at which Rosanna drowns herself in the Shivering Sand. She follows the arc of the stone that is "thrown in" and is also "sucked" down, never to be seen again.
A last link between Rosanna and the dark sensory language surrounding the Shivering Sand is made by Franklin Blake at the end of this chapter. As he "closes" his discussion of her suicide note, he describes the next stage of his story as his "toilsome journey from the darkness to the light." In Chapter 8 of his Third Narrative, he resolves to "force his way through all obstacles, from the darkness to the light" with the help of Sergeant Cuff's detective work.
