ts turnings was favourable or
unfavourable, according to the nature of the prevailing wind; sometimes
it broke the swell and caused it to fall; sometimes it exasperated it.
This latter effect was the most frequent. An obstacle arouses the anger
of the sea, and pushes it to excesses. The foam is the exaggeration of
the waves.

The stormy winds in these narrow and tortuous passages between the rocks
are subjected to a similar compression, and acquire the same malignant
character. The tempest frets in its sudden imprisonment. Its bulk is
still immense, but sharpened and contracted; and it strikes with the
massiveness of a huge club and the keenness of an arrow. It pierces even
while it strikes down. It is a hurricane contracted, like the draught
through the crevice of a door.

The two chains of rocks, leaving between them this kind of street in the
sea, formed stages at a lower level than the Douvres, gradually
decreasing, until they sunk together at a certain distance beneath the
waves.

There was another such gullet of less height than the gullet of the
Douvres, but narrower still, and which formed the eastern entrance of
the defile. It was evident that the double prolongation of the ridge of
rocks continued the kind of street under the water as far as "The Man
Rock," which stood like a square citadel at the extremity of the group.

At low water, indeed, which was the time at which Gilliatt was observing
them, the two rows of sunken rock showed their tips, some high and dry,
and all visible and preserving their parallel without interruption.

"The Man" formed the boundary, and buttressed on the eastern side the
entire mass of the group, which was protected on the opposite side by
the two Douvres.

The whole, from a bird's-eye view, appeared like a winding chaplet of
rocks, having the Douvres at one extremity and "The Man" at the other.

The Douvres, taken together, were merely two gigantic shafts of granite
protruding vertically and almost touching each other, and forming the
crest of one of the mountainous ranges lying beneath the ocean. Those
immense ridges are not only found rising out of the unfathomable deep.
The surf and the squall had broken them up and divided them like the
teeth of a saw. Only the tip of the ridge was visible; this was the
group of rocks. The remainder, which the waves concealed, must have been
enormous. The passage in which the storm had planted the Durande was the
way between these two