find it difficult to descend, are caverns, haunts, and dusky mazes,
where monstrous creatures multiply and destroy each other. Huge crabs
devour fish and are devoured in their turn. Hideous shapes of living
things, not created to be seen by human eyes, wander in this twilight.
Vague forms of antennae, tentacles, fins, open jaws, scales, and claws,
float about there, quivering, growing larger, or decomposing and
perishing in the gloom, while horrible swarms of swimming things prowl
about seeking their prey.

To gaze into the depths of the sea is, in the imagination, like
beholding the vast unknown, and from its most terrible point of view.
The submarine gulf is analogous to the realm of night and dreams. There
also is sleep, unconsciousness, or at least apparent unconsciousness, of
creation. There, in the awful silence and darkness, the rude first forms
of life, phantom-like, demoniacal, pursue their horrible instincts.

Forty years ago, two rocks of singular form signalled the Douvres from
afar to passers on the ocean. They were two vertical points, sharp and
curved--their summits almost touching each other. They looked like the
two tusks of an elephant rising out of the sea; but they were tusks,
high as tall towers, of an elephant huge as a mountain. These two
natural towers, rising out of the obscure home of marine monsters, only
left a narrow passage between them, where the waves rushed through. This
passage, tortuous and full of angles, resembled a straggling street
between high walls. The two twin rocks are called the Douvres. There was
the Great Douvre and the Little Douvre; one was sixty feet high, the
other forty. The ebb and flow of the tide had at last worn away part of
the base of the towers, and a violent equinoctial gale on the 26th of
October, 1859, overthrew one of them. The smaller one, which still
remains, is worn and tottering.

One of the most singular of the Douvres is a rock known as "The Man."
This still exists. Some fisherman in the last century visiting this spot
found on the height of the rock a human body. By its side were a number
of empty sea-shells. A sailor escaped from shipwreck had found a refuge
there; had lived some time upon rock limpets, and had died. Hence its
name of "The Man."

The solitudes of the sea are peculiarly dismal. The things which pass
there seem to have no relation to the human race; their objects are
unknown. Such is the isolation of the Douvres. All around, as far