though in truth I had as lief not heard it, for 'tis no pleasant thing
to see one's head wrote down so low as 20. And what I wanted most to
know, namely how Grace fared and how she took the bad news of her
father's death, I could not hear, for Elzevir said nothing, and I was
shy to ask him.

Now when I came entirely to myself, and was able to take stock of things,
I found that the place in which I lay was a cave some eight yards square
and three in height, whose straight-cut walls showed that men had once
hewed stone therefrom. On one side was that passage through which we had
come in, and on the other opened a sort of door which gave on to a stone
ledge eight fathoms above high-water mark. For the cave was cut out just
inside that iron cliff-face which lies between St. Alban's Head and
Swanage. But the cliffs here are different from those on the other side
of the Head, being neither so high as Hoar Head nor of chalk, but
standing for the most part only an hundred or an hundred and fifty feet
above the sea, and showing towards it a stern face of solid rock. But
though they rise not so high above the water, they go down a long way
below it; so that there is fifty fathom right up to the cliff, and many a
good craft out of reckoning in fog, or on a pitch-dark night, has run
full against that frowning wall, and perished, ship and crew, without a
soul to hear their cries. Yet, though the rock looks hard as adamant, the
eternal washing of the wave has worn it out below, and even with the
slightest swell there is a dull and distant booming of the surge in those
cavernous deeps; and when the wind blows fresh, each roller smites the
cliff like a thunder-clap, till even the living rock trembles again.

It was on a ledge of that rock-face that our cave opened, and sometimes
on a fine day Elzevir would carry me out thither, so that I might sun
myself and see all the moving Channel without myself being seen. For this
ledge was carved out something like a balcony, so that when the quarry
was in working they could lower the stone by pulleys to boats lying
underneath, and perhaps haul up a keg or two by the way of ballast, as
might be guessed by the stanchions still rusting in the rock.

Such was this gallery; and as for the inside of the cave, 'twas a great
empty room, with a white floor made up of broken stone-dust trodden hard
of old till one would say it was plaster; and dry, without those sweaty
damps so often seen in such places