Portals to Another World

These perfect little pools, plentiful in low-lying marshes, reflect the sky with mirrorlike clarity, but in their centers, purple-green layers of silt give way to a darkness of an unknowable depth.  That's why, in the crisply green and even edges of their perimeters, and the dark layers of silt at their centers, these pools take on an air of mystery.

..."Some of these are several feet deep, and have a spooky, antediluvian look," wrote  Whitney Balliett, in Weeset Journal, a piece in the October 3, 1983 issue of The New Yorker.  "Their bottoms are covered with soft, purple-green silt, [the silt itself] two or three feet deep."

Officially, these mysterious pools are salt pannes, water-filled depressions that occur in salt marshes.

Whitney Balliett says that they are also called pud holes, clam pools, or sloughs.  The first two names seem like a they are both a pretty earthy vernacular.   But slough?  That seems like a more technical term.  It would probably take a hydrologist or ecologist or geologist to determine what is a slough and what is a panne.

For now, I'd rather think of them as mysterious and murky.  Primeval.