HOW HE SAW STRANGE SIGHTS
Living thus face to face with Nature, and drawn through lack of other
occupation into unusually intimate association with her, Gard found his
lonely rock a centre of strange and novel experience.
Situated as he was, even small things forced themselves largely upon his
observation and wrought themselves into his memory. He found it good to
lose himself for a time in these visible and tangible actualities,
rather than in useless efforts after an understanding of the mystery of
which he was the victim and centre.
He had given over much time to pondering the subject of Tom Hamon’s
death, but had come no nearer any reasonable solution of it. That
hideous doubt as to himself in the matter recurred at times, but he
always hastened to dissipate it by some other interest more practical
and palpable, lest it should bring him to ultimate belief in its
possibility, and so to madness.
And so he spent hours watching that wonderful roaring cauldron on the
south stack where his water pools were. Other hours in study of the
social and domestic economies of gulls and cormorants. He saw families
of awkward little fawn-coloured squawkers force their way out of their
shells under his very eves, while indignant mothers told him what they
thought of him from a safe distance.
He bathed regularly in the heat of the day, but always after careful
inspection of his chosen pool, and one day fled in haste up the black
rocks at sight of the tip of a long, quivering, flesh-coloured tentacle
coming curling round a rock in the close neighbourhood of the pool in
which he was basking.
That monster under the rock gave him many a bad dream. It seemed to him
the incarnation of evil, and those horrible, bulging, merciless eyes
stuck like burrs in his memory.
One day, when he had been watching the cauldron, and filling his tin
dipper at the freshwater pools, as he came to descend the black wall
leading to the valley of rocks, he witnessed a little tragedy.
Down below, on the edge of the pool where the octopus dwelt, a silly
young cormorant was standing gazing into the water, so fascinated with
something it saw there that it forgot even to jerk its head in search of
understanding.
Gard stood and watched. He saw a tiny pale worm-like thing come creeping
up the black rock on which the cormorant squatted. The cormorant saw it
too, and he was hungry, as all cormorants always are, even after a full
meal. So presently he made a jab at it with his curved beak, and in a
moment the pale worm had twisted itself tightly round his silly neck,
and dragged him screaming and fluttering under the water.
Another day, when he was coming down by the break in the cliff, where
some great winter wave had bitten out such a slice that the top had come
tumbling down, he saw the monster sunning itself on the flat rock by the
side of its pool, like a huge nightmare spider.
The moment he appeared its great eyes settled on his as though it had
been waiting only for him. And when he stopped, with a feeling of
shuddering discomfort at its hugeness--for its body seemed considerably
over a foot in width, while its arms lounging over the rocks were each
at least six feet long, and looked horribly muscular--he could have
sworn that one of the great devil-eyes winked familiarly at him, as
though the beast would say, “Come on, come on! Nice day for a bathe!
Just waiting for you!”
He could see the loathsome body move as it breathed, swinging
comfortably in the support of its arms.
In a fury of repulsion he stooped to pick up a rock, but when he hurled
it the last tentacle was just sliding into the pool, and it seemed to
him that it waved an ironical farewell before it disappeared.
More than once fishing-boats hovered about his rock, but kept a safe
distance from the boiling underfalls, and he always lay in hiding till
they had gone.
But he saw more gracious and beautiful things than these.
As he lay one morning, looking over the ridge at the Sark headlands
shining in the sun--with a strong west wind driving the waves so briskly
that, Sark-like, they tossed their white crests into the air in angry
expostulation long before they met the rocks, and went roaring up them
in dazzling spouts of foam--his eye lighted on a gleam of unusual colour
on the racing green plain. It came again and again, and presently, as
the merry dance waxed wilder still, every white-cap as it tossed into
the air became a tiny rainbow, and the whole green plain was alive with
magical flutterings, of colours so dazzling that it seemed bestrewn with
dancing diamonds. A sight so wonderful that he found himself holding in
his! breath lest a puff should drive it all away.
That same evening, too, was a glory of colour such as he had never
dreamed of. The setting sun was ruby; red, and the cloud-bank into which
he sank was all rimmed with red fire that seemed to corruscate in its
burning brilliancy.
To Gard indeed, in the somewhat peculiar state of mind induced by his
sudden cutting-off from his kind and flinging back upon himself, it
seemed as though the blood-red sun had fallen into a vast consuming fire
behind that dark, fire-rimmed cloud, and that that was the end of it,
and it would never rise again.
The sky, right away into the farthest east, was flaming red with a hint
of underlying smoke below the glow. The sea was a weltering bath of
blood, and the cliffs of Sark, save for the gleam of white foam at their
feet, shone as red as though they had just been bodily dipped in it.
His lonely rock, when he looked round at it in wonder, was all
unfamiliarly red. There was a red fantastic glow in the very air, and he
himself was as red as though he had in very fact killed Tom Hamon, and
drenched himself with his blood.
So startling and unnatural was it all, that he found himself wondering
fearfully if these outside things were really all blood-red, or whether
something had gone wrong with his brain and eyes, and only caused them
to look so to him alone, or whether it was indeed the end of all things
shaping itself slowly under his very eyes. And in that thought and fear
he was not by any means alone.
But the wonderful red, which in its universality and intensity had
become overpowering and fearsome, faded at last, and he hailed its going
with a sigh of relief. His eyes and his brain were all right, he had not
killed Tom Hamon, and this was not the earth’s last sunset.
And again that night, as he sat on the ridge on sentinel duty till the
rising tide should lock the doors of his castle, the sea all round him
shone with phosphorescence; every breaking wave along the black plain
was a lambent gleam of lightning, and where they tore up the sides of
his rock they were like flames out of a fiery sea, so that he sat there
looking down upon a weltering band of nickering green and blue fires,
which clung to the black ledges and dripped slowly back into the
seething gleam below.
It was all very strange and very awesome, and he wondered what it might
portend in the way of further marvels.
And he had not long to wait.
Far away in the Atlantic a cyclone had been raging, and carrying havoc
in its skirts. Now it was whirling towards Europe, and the puffins crept
deep into their holes, and the gulls circled with disconsolate cries,
and the cormorants crouched gloomily in lee of their snuggest ledges,
and all nature seemed waiting for the blow.
Gard was awakened in the morning by the gale tearing at the massive
stones of his shelter as though it would carry them bodily into the sea.
And when he crawled out, flat like a worm, the wind caught him even so,
and he had to grimp to earth and anchor himself by projecting pieces of
rock.
Such seas as these he had never imagined round Sark; forgetting that
behind Guernsey lay thousands of miles of waters tortured past
endurance and racing now to escape the fury of the storm.
A white lash of spray came over him as he lay, and soaked him to the
skin, and, turning his face to the storm, he saw through the chinks of
his eyes a great wavering white curtain between him and the sky line.
The south-west portion of his island, where his freshwater pools were,
and the valley of rocks, were all awash, the mighty waves roaring clean
over the south stack, and rushing up into the black sky in rockets of
flying spray. The tide had still some time to run, and he feared what it
might be like at its fullest. It seemed to him by no means impossible
that it might sweep the whole rock bare.