d roarings
along the black ledges below never ceased.

Every nook and ledge of the out-cropping rock on the south side of the
ridge was occupied by lady gulls in all stages of their maternal duties.
From the surprise they expressed at his intrusion, and the way they
stuck to their nests, they were evidently quite unused to man and his
ways, and it was all he could do to avoid stepping on them and their
squawking families as he picked his way along.

He clambered down the eastern slope nearest Sark, and found the ground
there covered with a fairly deep soil, and green growths that were
strange to him. The soil was perforated with holes which at first he
ascribed to rabbits, but when he inserted his hand into one he got such
a nip from an unusually strong beak that he changed his mind to puffins,
and, standing quite still for a time, he presently saw the members of
the colony come creeping out behind their great red bills and scurry off
across the water in search of breakfast.

Then the great semi-detached pinnacle below attracted him, and he
scrambled down amid the complaints of a great colony of gulls and
cormorants but found the tide still too full for him to cross the
intervening chasm. Those wonderful great green waves out of a smooth sea
came roaring along the sides of the island and met full tilt in the
chasm below him, as they leaped exultant from their conflict with the
rocks. They hurled themselves against one another in wildest fury, and
the foam of their meeting boiled white along the ledges, and dappled all
the sea.

As he crawled through the lank wet grass and soft spongy soil, he found
himself suddenly confronted with a great barrier of fallen rocks; as
though, at some period of its existence, the north end of the island had
tapered to a gigantic peak which, in the fulness of its time, had come
down with a crash, and now lay like a titanic wall from summit to
sea-board. Huge and forbidding, of all shapes and sizes, the mighty
fragments barred his course like a menace, and he attacked them warily,
drawing himself with infinite caution from one to another; over this
one, under this, deftly between these two, lest an unwary weighting
should start them on the movement that might grind him to powder.

The fog increased their forbidding aspect tenfold. He could not see a
foot before him, and could only worm his way among them, testing each
before he trusted it, and finding at times monsters become but medioc