only into the bowels of the mountain. Gnawed by hunger, and
conscious that in a few hours at most the rising tide would fill the
subterranean passage and cut off his retreat, he pushed desperately
onwards. He had descended some ninety feet, and had lost, in the devious
windings of his downward path, all but the reflection of the light from
the gallery, when he was rewarded by a glimpse of sunshine striking
upwards. He parted two enormous masses of seaweed, whose bubble-headed
fronds hung curtainwise across his path, and found himself in the very
middle of the narrow cleft of rock through which the sea was driven to
the Blow-hole.

At an immense distance above him was the arch of cliff. Beyond that
arch appeared a segment of the ragged edge of the circular opening,
down which he had fallen. He looked in vain for the funnel-mouth whose
friendly shelter had received him. It was now indistinguishable. At his
feet was a long rift in the solid rock, so narrow that he could almost
have leapt across it. This rift was the channel of a swift black current
which ran from the sea for fifty yards under an arch eight feet high,
until it broke upon the jagged rocks that lay blistering in the sunshine
at the bottom of the circular opening in the upper cliff. A shudder
shook the limbs of the adventurous convict. He comprehended that at
high tide the place where he stood was under water, and that the narrow
cavern became a subaqueous pipe of solid rock forty feet long, through
which were spouted the league-long rollers of the Southern Sea.

The narrow strip of rock at the base of the cliff was as flat as
a table. Here and there were enormous hollows like pans, which the
retreating tide had left full of clear, still water. The crannies of
the rock were inhabited by small white crabs, and John Rex found to his
delight that there was on this little shelf abundance of mussels,
which, though lean and acrid, were sufficiently grateful to his famished
stomach. Attached to the flat surfaces of the numerous stones, moreover,
were coarse limpets. These, however, John Rex found too salt to be
palatable, and was compelled to reject them. A larger variety, however,
having a succulent body as thick as a man's thumb, contained in long
razor-shaped shells, were in some degree free from this objection, and
he soon collected the materials for a meal. Having eaten and sunned
himself, he began to examine the enormous rock, to the base of which he
had so s