But let us climb these slippery rocks, and picking our way cautiously
over yonder craggy ledges, leaping the chasms that yawn between
and reveal the hissing waters below, let us strive to attain the
vantage-ground of that ridge that we see some fifty feet above the
beach. It is perilous work, this scrambling over rocks, alternately
slimy with treacherous sea-weed, and bristling with sharp needle-points
of honey-combed limestone; now climbing a precipice, with the hands
clutching these same rough points, and the toes finding a precarious
hold in their interstices; now descending to a ledge awfully overhung;
now creeping along a narrow shelf, by working each foot on, a few
inches at a time; while the fingers nervously cling to the stony
precipice, and the mind strives to forget the rugged depths below, and
what would happen if--(ah! that “if!” let us cast it to the winds):
another long stride across a gulf, a bound upward, and here we are.
Yes, here we stand, on the bluff, looking out to seaward in the
very eye of the wind. We might have supposed it a tolerably smooth
slope of stone when we looked at the point from the sea, or from the
various parts of the shore whence we can see this promontory. But
very different is it on a close acquaintance. It is a wilderness of
craggy points and huge castellated masses of compact limestone marble,
piled one on another in the wildest and most magnificent confusion.
We have secured a comfortable berth, where, wedged in between two of
these masses, we can without danger lean on one breast-high, and gaze
over it down upon the very theatre of the elemental war. Is not this
a sight worth the toil and trouble and peril of the ascent? The rock
below is fringed with great insular peaks and blocks, bristling up
amidst the sea, of various sizes and of the most fantastic and singular
forms, which the sea at high-water would mostly cover; though now the
far-receding tide exposes their horrid points, and the brown leprous
coating of barnacles with which their lower sides are covered is
broadly seen between the swelling seas.
Heavily rolls in the long deep swell of the ocean from the
south-west; and as it approaches with its huge undulations driven
up into foaming crests before the howling gale, each mighty wave
breasts up against these rocks, as when an army of veteran legions
assaults an impregnable fortress. Impregnable indeed! for having
spent its fury in a rising wall of mingled water and foam, it shoots
up perpendicularly to an immense elevation, as if it would scale the
heights it could not overthrow, only to lie the next moment a broken
ruin of water, murmuring and shrieking in the moats below. The insular
peaks and blocks receive the incoming surge in an overwhelming flood,
which, immediately, as the spent wave recedes, pours off through the
interstices in a hundred beautiful jets and cascades; while in the
narrow straits and passages the rushing sea boils and whirls about in
curling sheets of snowy whiteness, curdling the surface; or, where it
breaks away, of the most delicate pea-green hue, the tint produced
by the bubbles seen through the water as they crowd to the air from
the depths where they were formed,--the evidence of the unseen combat
fiercely raging between earth and sea far below.