re
when his hand was on them. More than once he had to rest his hands on
cautiously-tried ledges and swing his legs forward and grope with his
feet for foothold, and whether the space below was trifling, or whether
it ran to incredible depth, he could not tell.

It was a mighty relief to him to come out at last on the other side of
the wall, and to find himself on the great north slope which faced Sark,
and so was closed to him in clear weather.

The long thin grass grew rankly here, and was beaded with moisture, but
he pushed along with an eerie feeling at the wildness of it all.

The mist clung close about him, but had suddenly become luminous. He
felt as though he were packed loosely all round with cotton wool on
which a strong light was shining. It gave him a feeling of
light-headedness. Everything was light about him, and yet he could not
see more than a couple of feet before his face. The waves roared
hoarsely below him, and once he had unknowingly got so low down that a
monstrous white arm, reaching suddenly up out of the depths, seemed
about to lay hold on him and drag him back with it into the turmoil.

He was panting and full of mist when at last he climbed the second great
rock barrier and rounded the corner towards the south.

And as he sat resting there, the whiff of a westerly breeze tore a long
lane in the white shroud, and for a moment he saw, as through a
telescope, the houses of Guernsey gleaming in bright sunshine. Then it
closed again, and presently began to drift past him in strange whorls
and spirals, like hurrying ghosts wrapped hastily in filmy garments,
which loosed at times and trailed slowly over the rocks and caught and
clung to their sharp projections. Then the sun completed the rout, and
the mist-ghosts swept away towards France, harried by the west wind like
a flock of sheep before the shepherd's dog.

In the afternoon the heat grew so intense that he was driven to the
wells in the valley of rocks for a bathe, for there was no shelter
available, and his bee-hive was like an oven.

None of the pools was large enough for a swim, and it was more than a
man's life was worth to venture among the boiling surges of the outer
rocks. But he could at all events get under water, if it was only to sit
there and cool off.

So he stripped, and was just about slipping into a deep still bath,
emerald green, with a fringe of amber weeds all round its almost
perpendicular sides, when, glancing down