through a fissure. Here is a rocky chamber, but without a roof; here a
bed of moss, but oozy with wet; here an arm-chair, but one of hard
stone.

The forge which Gilliatt intended was roughly sketched out by nature;
but nothing could be more troublesome than to reduce this rough sketch
to manageable shape, to transform this cavern into a laboratory and
smith's shop. With three or four large rocks, shaped like a funnel, and
ending in a narrow fissure, chance had constructed there a species of
vast ill-shapen blower, of very different power to those huge old forge
bellows of fourteen feet long, which poured out at every breath
ninety-eight thousand inches of air. This was quite a different sort of
construction. The proportions of the hurricane cannot be definitely
measured.

This excess of force was an embarrassment. The incessant draught was
difficult to regulate.

The cavern had two inconveniences; the wind traversed it from end to
end; so did the water.

This was not the water of the sea, but a continual little trickling
stream, more like a spring than a torrent.

The foam, cast incessantly by the surf upon the rocks and sometimes more
than a hundred feet in the air, had filled with sea water a natural cave
situated among the high rocks overlooking the excavation. The
overflowings of this reservoir caused, a little behind the escarpment, a
fall of water of about an inch in breadth, and descending four or five
fathoms. An occasional contribution from the rains also helped to fill
the reservoir. From time to time a passing cloud dropped a shower into
the rocky basin, always overflowing. The water was brackish, and unfit
to drink, but clear. This rill of water fell in graceful drops from the
extremities of the long marine grasses, as from the ends of a length of
hair.

He was struck with the idea of making this water serve to regulate the
draught in the cave. By the means of a funnel made of planks roughly and
hastily put together to form two or three pipes, one of which was fitted
with a valve, and of a large tub arranged as a lower reservoir, without
checks or counterweight, and completed solely by air-tight stuffing
above and air-holes below, Gilliatt, who, as we have already said, was
handy at the forge and at the mechanic's bench, succeeded in
constructing, instead of the forge-bellows, which he did not possess, an
apparatus less perfect than what is known now-a-days by the name of a
"cagniardelle," but less