for here was one
making.

Before us seethed a shallow horse-shoe bay, almost a lake, some two
hundred yards across inside, but far narrower at the mouth. Into
it, between two lofty points of hard rock, worn into caves and
pillars and natural arches, the trade-surf came raging in from the
north, hurling columns of foam right and left, and then whirling
round and round beneath us upon a narrow shore of black sand with
such fury that one seemed to see the land torn away by each wave.
The cliffs, some thirty feet high where we stood, rose to some
hundred at the mouth, in intense black and copper and olive shadows,
with one bright green tree in front of a cave's mouth, on which, it
seemed, the sun had never shone; while a thousand feet overhead were
glimpses of the wooded mountain-tops, with tender slanting lights,
for the sun was growing low, through blue-gray mist on copse and
lawn high above. A huge dark-headed Balata, {116a} like a storm-
torn Scotch pine, crowned the left-hand cliff; two or three young
Fan-palms, {116b} just ready to topple headlong, the right-hand one;
and beyond all, through the great gateway gleamed, as elsewhere, the
foam-flecked hazy blue of the Caribbean Sea.

We stood spellbound for a minute at the sudden change of scene and
of feeling. From the still choking blazing steam of the leeward
glen, we had stepped in a moment into coolness and darkness,
pervaded by the delicious rush of the north-eastern wind; into a
hidden sanctuary of Nature where one would have liked to build, and
live and die: had not a second glance warned us that to die was the
easiest of the three. For the whole cliff was falling daily into
the sea, and it was hardly safe to venture to the beach for fear of
falling stones and earth.

Down, however, we went, by a natural ladder of Matapalo roots, and
saw at once how the cove was being formed. The rocks are probably
Silurian; and if so, of quite immeasurable antiquity. But instead
of being hard, as Silurian rocks are wont to be, they are mere loose
beds of dark sand and shale, yellow with sulphur, or black with
carbonaceous matter, amid which strange flakes and nodules of white
quartz lie loose, ready to drop out at the blow of every wave. The
strata, too, sloped upward and outward toward the sea, which is
therefore able to undermine them perpetually; and thus the searching
surge, having once formed an entrance in the cliff face, betw