from below and through the water, a strange, sombre light.

Gilliatt, the pupils of whose eyes had contracted during his
explorations of the dusky corridor, could distinguish everything about
him in the pale glimmer.

He was familiar, from having often visited them, with the caves of
Plemont in Jersey, the Creux-Maille at Guernsey, the Boutiques at Sark;
but none of these marvellous caverns could compare with the subterranean
and submarine chamber into which he had made his way.

Under the water at his feet he could see a sort of drowned arch. This
arch, a natural ogive, fashioned by the waves, was glittering between
its two dark and profound supports. It was by this submerged porch that
the daylight entered into the cavern from the open sea. A strange light
shooting upward from a gulf.

The glimmer spread out beneath the waters like a large fan, and was
reflected on the rocks. Its direct rays, divided into long, broad
shafts, appeared in strong relief against the darkness below, and
becoming brighter or more dull from one rock to another, looked as if
seen here and there through plates of glass. There was light in that
cave it is true; but it was the light that was unearthly. The beholder
might have dreamed that he had descended in some other planet. The
glimmer was an enigma, like the glaucous light from the eye-pupil of a
Sphinx. The whole cave represented the interior of a death's-head of
enormous proportions, and of a strange splendour. The vault was the
hollow of the brain, the arch the mouth; the sockets of the eyes were
wanting. The cavern, alternately swallowing and rendering up the flux
and reflux through its mouth wide opened to the full noonday without,
seemed to drink in the light and vomit forth bitterness; a type of some
beings intelligent and evil. The light, in traversing this inlet through
the vitreous medium of the sea-water, became green, like a ray of
starlight from Aldebaran. The water, filled with the moist light,
appeared like a liquid emerald. A tint of aqua-marina of marvellous
delicacy spread a soft hue throughout the cavern. The roof, with its
cerebral lobes, and its rampant ramifications, like the fibres of
nerves, gave out a tender reflection of chrysoprase. The ripples
reflected on the roof were falling in order and dissolving again
incessantly, and enlarging and contracting their glittering scales in a
mysterious and mazy dance. They gave the beholder an impression of
something weir