t it was useless. Crags only a few yards
off, seemed like shadows in the thick white vapour. Again, I went on a
little; and, ere long, I heard rolling towards me, as it were, under
my own feet, and under the roaring of the sea, a howling, hollow,
intermittent sound--like thunder at a distance. I stopped again, and
rested against a rock. After some time, the mist began to part to
seaward, but remained still as thick as ever on each side of me. I went
on towards the lighter sky in front--the thunder-sound booming louder
and louder, in the very heart, as it seemed, of the great cliff.

The mist brightened yet a little more, and showed me a landmark to
ships, standing on the highest point of the surrounding rocks. I climbed
to it, recognised the glaring red and white pattern in which it was
painted, and knew that I had wandered, in the mist, away from the
regular line of coast, out on one of the great granite promontories
which project into the sea, as natural breakwaters, on the southern
shore of Cornwall.

I had twice penetrated as far as this place, at the earlier period of
my sojourn in the fishing-hamlet, and while I now listened to the
thunder-sound, I knew from what cause it proceeded.

Beyond the spot where I stood, the rocks descended suddenly, and almost
perpendicularly, to the range below them. In one of the highest parts of
the wall-side of granite thus formed, there opened a black, yawning hole
that slanted nearly straight downwards, like a tunnel, to unknown and
unfathomable depths below, into which the waves found entrance through
some subterranean channel. Even at calm times the sea was never silent
in this frightful abyss, but on stormy days its fury was terrific. The
wild waves boiled and thundered in their imprisonment, till they seemed
to convulse the solid cliff about them, like an earthquake. But, high
as they leapt up in the rocky walls of the chasm, they never leapt into
sight from above. Nothing but clouds of spray indicated to the eye, what
must be the horrible tumult of the raging waters below.

With my recognition of the place to which I had now wandered, came
remembrance of the dangers I had left behind me on the rock-track that
led from the mainland to the promontory--dangers of narrow ledges and
treacherous precipices, which I had passed safely, while unconscious
of them in the mist, but which I shrank from tempting again, now that I
recollected them, until the sky had cleared, and I could