colossal shafts.

This passage, zigzag in form as the forked lightning, was of about the
same width in all parts. The ocean had so fashioned it. Its eternal
commotion produces sometimes those singular regularities. There is a
sort of geometry in the action of the sea.

From one extremity to the other of the defile, the two parallel granite
walls confronted each other at a distance which the midship frame of the
Durande measured exactly. Between the two Douvres, the widening of the
Little Douvre, curved and turned back as it was, had formed a space for
the paddles. In any other part they must have been shattered to
fragments.

The high double facade of rock within the passage was hideous to the
sight. When, in the exploration of the desert of water which we call the
ocean, we come upon the unknown world of the sea, all is uncouth and
shapeless. So much as Gilliatt could see of the defile from the height
of the wreck, was appalling. In the rocky gorges of the ocean we may
often trace a strange permanent impersonation of shipwreck. The defile
of the Douvres was one of these gorges, and its effect was exciting to
the imagination. The oxydes of the rock showed on the escarpment here
and there in red places, like marks of clotted blood; it resembled the
splashes on the walls of an abattoir. Associations of the charnel-house
haunted the place. The rough marine stones, diversely tinted--here by
the decomposition of metallic amalgams mingling with the rock, there by
the mould of dampness, manifested in places by purple scales, hideous
green blotches, and ruddy splashes, awakened ideas of murder and
extermination. It was like the unwashed walls of a chamber which had
been the scene of an assassination; or it might have been imagined that
men had been crushed to death there, leaving traces of their fate. The
peaked rocks produced an indescribable impression of accumulated
agonies. Certain spots appeared to be still dripping with the carnage;
here the wall was wet, and it looked impossible to touch it without
leaving the fingers bloody. The blight of massacre seemed everywhere. At
the base of the double parallel escarpment, scattered along the water's
edge, or just below the waves, or in the worn hollows of the rocks, were
monstrous rounded masses of shingle, some scarlet, others black or
purple, which bore a strange resemblance to internal organs of the body;
they might have been taken for human lungs, or heart, or liver,
scat