een
what are now the two outer points, has had nought to do but to gnaw
inward; and will gnaw, till the Isle of Monos is cut sheer in two,
and the 'Ance Biscayen,' as the wonderful little bay is called, will
join itself to the Ance Maurice and the Gulf of Paria. In two or
three generations hence the little palm-wood will have fallen into
the sea. In two or three more the negro house and garden and the
mangrove swamp will be gone likewise: and in their place the trade-
surf will be battering into the Gulf of Paria from the Northern Sea,
through just such a mountain chasm as we saw at Huevos; and a new
Boca will have been opened.

But not, understand, a deep and navigable one, as long as the land
retains its present level. To make that, there must be a general
subsidence of the land and sea bottom around. For surf, when eating
into land, gnaws to little deeper than low-water mark: no deeper,
probably, than the bottoms of the troughs between the waves. Its
tendency is--as one may see along the Ramsgate cliffs--to pare the
land away into a flat plain, just covered by a shallow sea. No surf
or currents could nave carved out the smaller Bocas to a depth of
between twenty and eighty fathoms; much less the great Boca of the
Dragon's Mouth, between Chacachacarra and the Spanish Main, to a
depth of more than seventy fathoms. They are sunken mountain
passes, whose sides have been since carved into upright cliffs by
the gnawing of the sea; and, as Mr. Wall well observes, {117} 'the
situation of the Bocas is in a depression of the range, perhaps of
the highest antiquity.'

We wandered along the beach, looking up at a cliff clothed, wherever
it was not actually falling away, with richest verdure down to the
water's edge; but in general utterly bare, falling away too fast to
give root-hold to any plant. We lay down on the black sand, and
gazed, and gazed, and picked up quartz crystals fallen from above,
and wondered how the cove had got its name. Had some old Biscayan
whaler, from Biarritz or St. Jean de Luz, wandered into these seas
in search of fish, when, in the beginning of the seventeenth
century, he and his fellows had killed out all the Right Whales of
the Bay of Biscay? And had he, missing the Bocas, been wrecked and
perished, as he may well have done, against those awful walls? At
last we turned to re-ascend--for the tide was rising--after our
leader had congratulated us on b