...Huh. 

What happens if she attempts to dig in the sand with tentacles and feet?

It behaves like sand, much as the water in the river behaved like water. She can dig it up and uncover the sandstone below it.

She hits the sandstone with the pickaxe. 

Bop! The specific cube of sandstone that she hit is abruptly transformed into a Tiny Sandstone Item.

Neat. She hits some more sandstone. Bop bop bop. She's going to keep doing this until something other than more sandstone underneath happens. 

That might take a while.

In fact, before she reaches that point, she'll reach the point where the sand pouring in from the sides is too deep for her to reach the sandstone with her pickaxe.

Also she has a whole lot of sandstone now.

Hmm she can place the sandstone, right? What if she creates a wall of sandstone around herself to keep the sand out and then flings all the sand that is currently inside the wall out of it. 

This is... moderately effective. Kind of a hassle, though, because she can only place the sandstone into a gridspace that is almost completely free of sand. If she's really really diligent about digging, though, then yes, she can manage it.

She is really really diligent about digging and she has a lot of limbs to do it with. 

It's still gonna take a while, though. How long are the days here?

The sun is descending in the west, and it's well past the point where the edge of her pit casts a shadow that covers the bottom of the pit completely.

She crafts a torch and sticks it to the wall and keeps digging. 

And digging.

And digging.

And digging.

Okay this is dumb. Can she craft more pickaxes? Out of cactus or something? 

Yes, as a matter of fact! Cactus pickaxes are green and oddly springy, but they bop sandstone just as efficiently as her wooden one.

Something falls into her pit. She might catch a glimpse of a translucent, shimmering, sand-coloured slime sailing through the air before it lands on top of her and splatters everywhere.

Ooh, what do sand slimes taste like? She wipes up some goo to taste it. 

Sort of like... cake? A fairly bland light cake, like a cupcake with no frosting. In jelly form.

Mm, nice. 

She considers her current number of pickaxes, considers how long it took her to dig a hole this deep with only one, and crawls up out of the hole to harvest more cactus. And maybe eat some more slime. 

The sun is setting by this point. A couple more of the sandy slimes are hopping by, shimmering prettily in the light. There's plenty of cactus near the pit.

She eats the slimes and spits out the gel like cherry pits, then sets to harvesting cactus. She doesn't craft all of it into pickaxes, though; she wants more cactus later if she needs it, so she plants some of it in rings around her hole. 

A sensible plan!

The sun sets; the moon rises. The stars are bright and beautiful, a glittering expanse above the pit.

A couple of minutes after sunset, more things start falling into her pit. Just two to start with.

They look... well, like people, after a fashion. People who have been dead for several years, in the desert so they're all dried-out and withered instead of rotted, and they smell like death and dust and they make horrible rattly groaning sounds as they land on top of her and attempt to beat her to death with their bare hands.

Eww! Ahh! She's not scared of them but they're still...concerning. Really, really concerning. 

She snatches them up in her tentacles, abandoning her pickaxes on the floor of the hole, and scurries up to the surface. 

They're surprisingly strong; they kick and hit and bite and struggle and do minor damage to the tentacles she's holding them with.

Also, before she's out of the pit, two more land on her. And once she's on the surface again, she can see another three shambling toward her from seemingly random directions.

She has so many tentacles, she can collect all seven. 

And then go tearing off back towards where Wilbur and the spirit are. 

Once she's back in the forest, the corpses shambling toward her are much less dry! It's kind of gross.

Sooo gross. She attempts to dodge around them.