with the beauty of the
scene before him.
The whole east coast of Sark right up to the Burons, off the Creux, lay
basking in the morning light. Dixcart and Derrible held no secrets from
him; he looked straight up their shining beaches. Their bold headlands
were like giant-fists reaching out along the water towards him.
Breniere, the nearest point to his rock, was another mighty grasping
hand, but between it and him swept a furious race of tossing,
white-capped waves, with here and there black fangs of rock which stuck
up through the green waters as though hungering for prey.
He could just see the upper part of the miners' cottages on the cliff
above Rouge Terrier, but, beyond these and the ruined mill on Hog's
Back, not another sign of man and his toilsome, troublesome little
works. But for these, Sark, in its utter loneliness, might have been a
new-found island, and he its first discoverer.
Ranging on, his eye rested on the shattered fragments of Little Sark,
scattered broadcast over the sea about its most southerly point--bare
black pinnacles, ragged ledges, islets, rocklets, reefs, and fangs,
every one of which seemed to stir the placid sea to wildest wrath.
Elsewhere it danced and dimpled in the sunshine, with only the long slow
heave in it to tell of the sleeping giant below, but round each rock,
and up the sides of his own huge pyramid, it swept in great green
combers shot with bubbling white, and went tumbling back upon itself in
rings of boiling foam.
Beyond, he saw the rounded back of Jethou, and just behind it the long
line of houses in Guernsey.
He lay long enjoying it all, with the warm sun on his back, and the
brisk wind toning his blood, but no view, however wonderful, will
satisfy a man's stomach. He had fed the day before mostly on most
unsatisfying emotions, and now he began to feel the need of something
more solid. So he crept back along the slope to find out what there was
for breakfast.
His stores lay about the floor of his resting-place, just as he had
turned them out in the night; a couple of long loaves, a good-sized
piece of raw bacon, and another of boiled pork which he thought he
recognized, some butter in a cloth, a bottle which looked as if it might
contain spirits, the powder-flask, and a small linen bag containing
bullets, snail-shot, and percussion caps. These, with Bernel's gun and
the blanket, and the old woollen cloak, which he recognized as Mr.
Hamon's roquelaure, and his
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