ored and buffeted by gales that hardly any trees,
except the stunted dwarf-elder, can survive the winter fury on its open
slopes. When a westerly gale is blowing, many ships run in under its
lee-shore for shelter; but its only landing-place is at the south-east
angle by Rat Island, and that becomes dangerous in an easterly wind, so
that boats have to be beached on the south or west side, though with
difficulty and some danger. Add to this that the road from the
landing-stage is so narrow and steep that it could be held by two men,
and its suitability as a robber stronghold becomes clear.

It is a land of romance, singular in every aspect: in the formation of
its rocks, in the birds that haunt its cliffs and the beasts that haunt
its caves, in its antiquities, and the whole course of its adventurous
history. It is a granite rock, with here and there patches of
clay-shale, notably at the south-eastern corner; but the granite is
differentiated from the granite of Devon, to which it is so proximate,
and of so marked a character that it can be traced in many buildings
along the northern coasts of Devon and Cornwall, principally in towers
and churches, proving that quarries must have been worked on Lundy at
some time during the Middle Ages, and before the fifteenth century; for
there is comparatively little building of churches after that date. A
company was formed in 1863 to work the Lundy granite-quarries, and it
was intended to use this stone in the building of the Thames
Embankment; but the difficulty of shipment from so inaccessible a spot
proving insuperable, the enterprise was abandoned.

But apart from the height and boldness of these granite cliffs, rising
in places almost sheer to a height of more than seven hundred feet,
with outlying reefs and insular rocks bristling black and jagged
through the foaming waters, with gully, creek, and cave, worn by the
action of rain and sea, there is a further wildness given to the island
by a great series of clefts or fissures, running for a considerable
distance in a line irregularly parallel to the cliff, sometimes from
ten to twenty feet across, and as much as eighty feet deep, where they
can be measured; at other places too narrow for sounding, but seeming
to strike right down into the bowels of the earth. Locally this
phenomenon is called the "earthquake," and the popular tradition of the
island ascribes its appearance to the great earthquake at Lisbon in
1755; but it