t rock, and, quiet as a watching otter, leant prone, till his
faculties, abroad with wonder and awe, returned to level service. Not a
sound, not a ripple came to disprove his utter solitude.

He slipped back into the water to examine further; a sense of
profanation, not to be shaken off, subdued his spirit, and constrained
him to diffident movement through the exceeding beauty of those jewelled
aisles. Wherever he went play of light and colour encircled him: luminous
weavings that strayed into shadowy angles, investing and adorning with
delicate favours. Slender isles crept away into gloom, extending into
mystery the actual dimensions of the great cavern: these he must enter,
every one, for his thorough satisfaction. More than once the marbling
and stains of the rocks deluded him, so like were they to frescoes--of
battle array in confusion under a fierce winged sunset, of sea-beasts
crouched and huddled, prone and supine, and again of sea-beasts locked
together in strife. He came upon the likeness of a skull, an ill omen
that dealt him a sudden thrill of superstitious fear. It needed close
scrutiny in the vague light to decide that no hand of man had shaped all
these. Once light broke in from above, and he saw overhead a narrow strip
of intense blue, and a white flash from the wing of a passing sea-mew. He
tried to scale the cleft, so to reach the heights of the main island; but
the steep rocks gave no sufficient foothold, and he dropped back into the
water bruised and discomfited. Tunnels and archways there were, too low
and strait to let him pass. Attempting an arch, submerged like the way of
his entrance, his broad shoulders got wedged, and he struggled back,
strangling, spent, and warned against needless hazards.

He never noticed that in the great cavern one after another the rays of
sunlight overhead shifted and withdrew, till twilight, advancing below,
surprised him. His reckoning of time had been lost utterly, charmed out
of him in the vast of beauty and mystery. In a moment he also realised
that the lowest tiers of rocks had vanished below the water. The tide was
rising. Hurriedly he shot away for return, and groped along the dim
passage. The water had risen half-way towards the upper level, so that he
mounted there with no difficulty, and made his way on, through the
entrance cave, through the kelp-curtained cleft, and out again upon the
smooth white sands.

Too late! That he knew by the sound of heavy waves