ut them on for
the climb. When she reached the point she found the work easier than she
had suspected. The rocks were not strewn at random, they were in reality
breaks off and tables of the basalt; the whole point was like a great
lizard that, creeping stealthily towards the sea, had been stricken into
rock.

She climbed, and in five minutes was on the highest point with a new
view of the coast before her. It was like looking at Ferocity. Here the
rocks were broken and tumbled about, indeed, rocks, huge and spired like
churches, cliffs black and polished with the washing of the waves,
monoliths standing out in the blue-green water and all ringing and
singing to the chime of the sea. Inland, canons of night and shoulders
of dolerite and plains where nothing grew leading to great level
bastions, fortifications that seemed built by rule and plumb line, with
the markings of the basalt visible through the clear air. Basalt has
that terrible peculiarity. It seems the work of a hand, it makes castles
and fortifications whose ruled markings bear the inevitable suggestions
of masonry.

And across all that not a sign of life save the wings of the tireless
birds, teal and duck, cormorants, and beyond the seaward rocks the great
sea geese fishing and the guillemots flighting and the white tern
darting like dragon-flies.

Where was Bompard?

Had he, by any chance, come back and taken some other road off the
beach? There was only one way: the break in the cliffs, beyond the
caves. She thought it highly improbable that he would have come back
only to leave the beach by another way, the descent from where she stood
and towards the bed country was quite easy, alluringly easy. No, he
would have gone on.

She sat down to rest and watch.

At any moment he might appear in the distance. From where she sat the
sea lay straight before her and the far off islands, to the left the
rock strewn coast, to the right the great curving beach.

Behind her the country stormed away, stern, grey-grim and treeless, to
the foothills whose misty mauve lay stretched before the mountains.

Every now and then she would turn towards the left searching the country
and cliffs with her eyes, but no form appeared.

She remembered now that he had talked about sea birds' eggs and how to
get them. Might he have gone hunting for eggs over those cliffs and
fallen?

She remembered also when the two men had come back from their expedition
inland they had brou