eserted. Having arisen and put his dress
in some order, he looked more accurately round him; but all was still
solitary. If it had not been for the decayed brands of the fire, now
sunk into grey ashes, and the remnants of the festival, consisting
of bones half burnt and half gnawed, and an empty keg or two, there
remained no traces of Donald and his band. When Waverley sallied forth
to the entrance of the cave, he perceived that the point of rock, on
which remained the marks of last night's beacon, was accessible by
a small path, either natural, or roughly hewn in the rock, along the
little inlet of water which ran a few yards up into the cavern, where,
as in a wet-dock, the skiff which brought him there the night before
was still lying moored. When he reached the small projecting platform
on which the beacon had been established, he would have believed his
further progress by land impossible, only that it was scarce probable
but that the inhabitants of the cavern had some mode of issuing from it
otherwise than by the lake. Accordingly, he soon observed three or four
shelving steps, or ledges of rock, at the very extremity of the little
platform; and, making use of them as a staircase, he clambered by their
means around the projecting shoulder of the crag on which the cavern
opened, and, descending with some difficulty on the other side, he
gained the wild and precipitous shores of a Highland loch, about four
miles in length, and a mile and a half across, surrounded by heathy
and savage mountains, on the crests of which the morning mist was still
sleeping.

Looking back to the place from which he came, he could not help admiring
the address which had adopted a retreat of such seclusion and
secrecy. The rock, round the shoulder of which he had turned by a few
imperceptible notches, that barely afforded place for the foot, seemed,
in looking back upon it, a huge precipice, which barred all further
passage by the shores of the lake in that direction. There could be
no possibility, the breadth of the lake considered, of descrying the
entrance of the narrow and low-browed cave from the other side; so
that, unless the retreat had been sought for with boats, or disclosed
by treachery, it might be a safe and secret residence to its garrison
as long as they were supplied with provisions. Having satisfied his
curiosity in these particulars, Waverley looked around for Evan Dhu and
his attendants, who, he rightly judged, would be a