rd, and to the low vanishing coast of
Holderness southward, appeared those cracks and caves which had brought
me here, though there seemed no attempts at barricades; however, I got
down a rough slope on the south side to a rude wild beach, strewn with
wave-worn masses of chalk: and never did I feel so paltry and short a
thing as there, with far-outstretched bays of crags about me, their
bluffs encrusted at the base with stale old leprosies of shells and
barnacles, and crass algae-beards, and, higher up, the white cliff all
stained and weather-spoiled, the rock in some parts looking quite
chalky, and elsewhere gleaming hard and dull like dirty marbles, while
in the huge withdrawals of the coast yawn darksome gullies and caverns.
Here, in that morning's walk, I saw three little hermit-crabs, a limpet,
and two ninnycocks in a pool of weeds under a bearded rock. What
astonished me here, and, indeed, above, and everywhere, in London even,
and other towns, was the incredible number of birds that strewed the
ground, at some points resembling a real rain, birds of nearly every
sort, including tropic specimens: so that I had to conclude that they,
too, had fled before the cloud from country to country, till conquered
by weariness and grief, and then by death.

By climbing over rocks thick with periwinkles, and splashing through
great sloppy stretches of crinkled sea-weed, which give a raw stench of
brine, I entered the first of the gullies: a narrow, long, winding one,
with sides polished by the sea-wash, and the floor rising inwards. In
the dark interior I struck matches, able still to hear from outside the
ponderous spasmodic rush and jostle of the sea between the crags of the
reef, but now quite faintly. Here, I knew, I could meet only dead men,
but urged by some curiosity, I searched to the end, wading in the middle
through a three-feet depth of sea-weed twine: but there was no one; and
only belemnites and fossils in the chalk. I searched several to the
south of the headland, and then went northward past it toward another
opening and place of perched boats, called in the map North Landing:
where, even now, a distinct smell of fish, left by the old crabbers and
herring-fishers, was perceptible. A number of coves and bays opened as I
proceeded; a faded green turf comes down in curves at some parts on the
cliff-brows, like wings of a young soldier's hair, parted in the middle,
and plastered on his brow; isolated chalk-masses are