f gigantic saws set up on end alongside one
another.

He crawled across these rough serrations and scaled the rifted black
wall in front, and came at once on a number of shallow pools of
rain-water lying in the hollows of a mighty slab.

But the moment his head rose above the level of the steep black wall his
ears were filled with a deafening roaring and rushing, supplemented by
most tremendous dull thuddings which shook the stack like the blows of a
mighty flail.

From behind a further wall there rose a boiling mist, through which
lashed up white jets of spray which slanted over the rocks beyond in a
continuous torrent.

He crawled to the further wall and looked over into a deep black gully,
some fifteen feet wide and perhaps thirty feet deep, into which, out of
a perfectly calm sea, most monstrous waves came roaring and leaping,
till the whole chasm was foaming and spuming like an over-boiling
milk-pan. In the middle of the chasm, for the further torment of the
waters, was jammed a huge black rock, against which the incoming green
avalanche dashed itself to fragments and went rocketing into the air.
The solid granite at the further end was cleft from summit to base by a
tiny rift a foot wide through which the boiling spume poured out to the
sea beyond.

But the marvel was where those gigantic waves came from. Save for the
dancing wind-ripples and its long, slow internal pulsations, the sea was
as smooth as a pond to within twenty yards of the rocks. Then it
suddenly seemed to draw itself together, to draw itself down into itself
indeed, like a tiger compressing its springs for a leap, and then, with
a rush and a roar, it launched itself at the rocks with the weight of
the ocean behind it, and hurtled blindly into the chasm where the black
rock lay.

It was a most wonderful sight, and Gard sat long watching it, then and
later, fascinated always and puzzled by that extraordinary
self-compression and sudden upleap of the waters out of an otherwise
placid sea.

It was but one more odd expression of Nature's fantastic humour, and the
nearest he could come to an explanation of it was that, in the sea bed
just there, was some great fault, some huge chasm into which the waters
fell and then came leaping out to further torment on the rocks.

It was as he was returning to his own quarters by a somewhat different
route across the valley of rocks, that he lighted on another find which
contented him greatly.

In one o