not forty feet across the narrowest.
When the tide was full, this was clear and still, like a pool on a land
river; only there was a difference in the weeds and fishes, and the
water itself was green instead of brown; but when the tide went out, in
the bottom of the ebb, there was a day or two in every month when you
could pass dryshod from Aros to the mainland. There was some good
pasture, where my uncle fed the sheep he lived on; perhaps the feed was
better because the ground rose higher on the islet than the main level
of the Ross, but this I am not skilled enough to settle. The house was a
good one for that country, two stories high. It looked westward over a
bay, with a pier hard by for a boat, and from the door you could watch
the vapours blowing on Ben Kyaw.

On all this part of the coast, and especially near Aros, these great
granite rocks that I have spoken of go down together in troops into the
sea, like cattle on a summer's day. There they stand, for all the world
like their neighbours ashore; only the salt water sobbing between them
instead of the quiet earth, and clots of sea-pink blooming on their
sides instead of heather; and the great sea-conger to wreathe about the
base of them instead of the poisonous viper of the land. On calm days
you can go wandering between them in a boat for hours, echoes following
you about the labyrinth; but when the sea is up, Heaven help the man
that hears that caldron boiling.

Off the south-west end of Aros these blocks are very many, and much
greater in size. Indeed, they must grow monstrously bigger out to sea,
for there must be ten sea miles of open water sown with them as thick as
a country place with houses, some standing thirty feet above the tides,
some covered, but all perilous to ships; so that on a clear, westerly
blowing day, I have counted, from the top of Aros, the great rollers
breaking white and heavy over as many as six-and-forty buried reefs. But
it is nearer in shore that the danger is worst; for the tide, here
running like a mill-race, makes a long belt of broken water--a _Roost_
we call it--at the tail of the land. I have often been out there in a
dead calm at the slack of the tide; and a strange place it is, with the
sea swirling and combing up and boiling like the caldrons of a linn, and
now and again a little dancing mutter of sound as though the _Roost_
were talking to itself. But when the tide begins to run again, and above
all in heavy weather, th