same
ghastly chasm: but ghastly now no longer; and as Elsley looked down,
the beauty below invited him, and the coolness also; for the sun beat
on the flat rock above till it scorched the feet, and dazzled the eye,
and crisped up the blackening sea-weeds; while every sea-snail crept
to hide itself under the bladder-tangle, and nothing dared to peep or
stir save certain grains of gunpowder, which seemed to have gone mad,
so merrily did they hop about upon the surface of the fast evaporating
salt-pools. That wonder, indeed, Elsley stooped to examine, and drew
back his hands with an "ugh!" and a gesture of disgust, when he found
that they were "nasty little insects." For Elsley held fully the
poet's right to believe that all things are not very good; none,
indeed, save such as suited his eclectic and fastidious taste; and to
hold (on high aesthetic grounds, of course) toads and spiders in as
much abhorrence as does any boarding-school girl. However, finding
some rock ledges which formed a natural ladder, down he scrambled,
gingerly enough, for he was neither an active nor a courageous man.
But, once down, I will do him the justice to say, that for five whole
minutes he forgot all about Fra Dolcino, and, what was better, about
himself also.

The chasm may have been fifteen feet deep, and above, about half that
breadth; but below, the waves had hollowed it into dark overhanging
caverns. Just in front of him a huge boulder spanned the crack; and
formed a natural doorway, through which he saw, like a picture set in
a frame, the far-off blue sea softening into the blue sky among brown
Eastern haze. Amid the haze a single ship hung motionless, like a
white cloud. Nearer, a black cormorant floated sleepily along, and
dived, and rose again. Nearer again, long lines of flat tide-rock,
glittering and quivering in the heat, sloped gradually under the
waves, till they ended in half-sunken beds of olive oar-weed, which
bent their tangled stems into a hundred graceful curves, and swayed to
and fro slowly and sleepily. The low swell slid whispering among their
floating palms, and slipped on toward the cavern's mouth, as if asking
wistfully (so Elsley fancied) when it would be time for it to return
to that cool shade, and hide from all the blinding blaze outside. But
when his eye was enough accustomed to the shade within, it withdrew
gladly from the glaring sea and glaring tide-rocks to the walls of the
chasm itself; to curved and polis