LIOT CAVES.

Olivia was very silent.

The coast of Sark shows some of the most fantastic workmanship of the
sea, but the Gouliot Caves are its wildest and maddest freak. A strong,
swift current sets in from the southwest, and being lashed into a giddy
fury by the lightest southwest wind, it has hewn out of the rock a
series of cells, and grottos, and alcoves, some of them running far
inland, in long, vaulted passages and corridors, with now and then a
shaft or funnel in the rocky roof, through which the light streams down
into recesses far from the low porches, which open from the sea. Here
and there a crooked, twisted tunnel forms a skylight overhead, and the
blue heavens look down through it like a far-off eye. You cannot number
the caverns and niches. Everywhere the sea has bored alleys and
galleries, or hewn out solemn aisles, with arches intersecting each
other, and running off into capricious furrows and mouldings. There are
innumerable refts, and channels, and crescents, and cupolas,
half-finished or only hinted at. There are chambers of every height and
shape, leading into one another by irregular portals, but all rough and
rude, as though there might have been an original plan, from which,
while the general arrangement is kept, every separate stroke perversely
diverged.

But another, and not a secondary, curiosity of this ocean-labyrinth is,
that it is the habitat of a multitude of marine creatures, not to be
seen at home in many other places. Except twice a month, at the
neaptides, the lower chambers are filled with the sea; and here live and
flourish thousands, upon thousands of those mollusks and zoophytes which
can exist only in its salt waters. The sides of the caves, as far as the
highest tides swept, were studded with crimson and purple and amber
mollusca, glistening like jewels in the light pouring down upon them
from the eyelet-openings overhead. Not the space of a finger-tip was
clear. Above them in the clefts of the rock hung fringes of delicate
ferns of the most vivid green, while here and there were nooks and
crevices of profound darkness, black with perpetual, unbroken shadow.

I had known the caves well when I was a boy, but it was many years since
I had been there. Now I was alone in them with Olivia, no other human
being in sight or sound of us. I had scarcely eyes for any sight but
that of her face, which had grown shy and downcast, and was generally
turned away from me. She would be fri