mile, could pierce a cuirass with their yard-long
arrows. Uncultivated land makes coarse wool. The Chesil of to-day
resembles in no particular the Chesil of the past, so much has it been
disturbed by man and by those furious winds which gnaw the very stones.

At present this tongue of land bears a railway, terminating in a pretty
square of houses, called Chesilton, and there is a Portland station.
Railway carriages roll where seals used to crawl.

The Isthmus of Portland two hundred years ago was a back of sand, with a
vertebral spine of rock.

The child's danger changed its form. What he had had to fear in the
descent was falling to the bottom of the precipice; in the isthmus, it
was falling into the holes. After dealing with the precipice, he must
deal with the pitfalls. Everything on the sea-shore is a trap--the rock
is slippery, the strand is quicksand. Resting-places are but snares. It
is walking on ice which may suddenly crack and yawn with a fissure,
through which you disappear. The ocean has false stages below, like a
well-arranged theatre.

The long backbone of granite, from which fall away both slopes of the
isthmus, is awkward of access. It is difficult to find there what, in
scene-shifters' language, are termed _practicables_. Man has no
hospitality to hope for from the ocean; from the rock no more than from
the wave. The sea is provident for the bird and the fish alone.
Isthmuses are especially naked and rugged; the wave, which wears and
mines them on either side, reduces them to the simplest form. Everywhere
there were sharp relief ridges, cuttings, frightful fragments of torn
stone, yawning with many points, like the jaws of a shark; breaknecks of
wet moss, rapid slopes of rock ending in the sea. Whosoever undertakes
to pass over an isthmus meets at every step misshapen blocks, as large
as houses, in the forms of shin-bones, shoulder-blades, and
thigh-bones, the hideous anatomy of dismembered rocks. It is not
without reason that these _striae_ of the sea-shore are called
_cotes_.[9]

The wayfarer must get out as he best can from the confusion of these
ruins. It is like journeying over the bones of an enormous skeleton.

Put a child to this labour of Hercules.

Broad daylight might have aided him. It was night. A guide was
necessary. He was alone. All the vigour of manhood would not have been
too much. He had but the feeble strength of a child. In default of a
guide, a footpath might have aided hi