And now the various movements in the orchestra of the sea began to assemble and marshal before their ears. Here the shrill silver hiss of the long waves toppling in curved cascades, and running swiftly inland on the sand. Here the roar and rattle of stubborn boulders torn from their rocky holds by the mad out-wash of the shattered wave. Here the low hollow groaning of protesting caves, vocal, inscrutable. Afar off the deep boom of the mighty wave, which, gliding up to the land, a green, unbroken mound of water, flung itself in white, impotent rage against the unrepining, unappalled, forlorn cliffs, and made the air thunder with mutinous clamour.
There was no storm-nothing beyond the ordinary winter roller of the Atlantic.
The car stopped, and the two friends descended.
"It's only a few hundred yards from this to the cliff over the Black Rock," said the driver. "But it's lonely there on a day like this. Don't go down. Don't trust yourself on that rock a day like this. She may begin any minute a day like this, and if she catches you between her and the water, you're dead men."
The two friends struck across the downs, the younger leading the way.
CHAPTER XXII THE ROCK
No bird was visible in the air, no ship on the sea, no living creature on the land but the two men, O'Hanlon and O'Brien. A mile inland stood lonely Kilcash House, which had for years been the home of the dead man and his beautiful wife. Below, between the towering, oppressive, liver-coloured cliffs and the foam-mantled, blanched blue sea lay the Black Rock, a huge, flat, monstrous table cast off by the land and spurned by the sea.
For a while the two men stood speechless on the edge of the cliff overlooking the barren waste of heaving waters and the sullen ramparts of indomitable heights. The deep boom of the bursting wave, the roar of the outwashing boulders, and the shrill hiss of the falling
spray, made the dismal scene more deserted and forlorn. The sea and cliffs were forbidding to man. They seemed to resent the presence of man-to desire, now that they were not engaged in actual war, no intrusion on the lines where their gigantic conflicts were waged.
The Black Rock stretched out half-a-mile from the base of the cliff into the sea, and was half-a-mile wide. Above it the land was slightly hollowed towards the sea, and would, but for the Black Rock beneath, form a bay-like indentation in the shore. The chord of this arc was about six hundred yards, so that the greater mass of the Black Rock projected into the sea beyond the heads of the cliffs.
The Rock, as it was called for brevity in the neighbourhood, was only a few feet above the reach of the waves and broken water when a strong wind blew from the south-west. It shelved outward, and when the waters were very rough, when a storm raged, the shattered waves leaped up on it, and bounded, hissing in irresistible fury, towards the inner cliff, but were arrested, dispersed, and poured down the sides of the Rock ere they reached the inner cliff. The Rock was highest at the centre, and descended to right, left, front, and rear. But although it was lower at the rear than in the centre, it was much higher there than in front. Viewed from above, it was not unlike the back of some prodigious sea monster rising above the surface of the water. In shape it resembled a vast creature of the barnacle kind, the apex of whose shell would represent the highest point of the Rock, and the corrugations stand for the ridges and hollows of the sides from the highest point of the ledge to the lower ones.
The colour, too, was not unlike that of a barnacle. For, although the people had given it the name of the Black Rock, it was black only by comparison with the cliffs. The surface was made up of smooth, slimy ridges, dark blue-green in the hollows, growing lighter as the curve sloped upward, and on the summit, here and there, deep yellow brown or oak.
Winter or summer, the Rock was never quite dry. It was always damp, clammy, treacherous. It was always dangerous to the foot. There was no fear of one who fell slipping into the sea, unless the misfortune occurred very near the brink. Then a fall and a plunge were certain death, for the great rollers of the ocean would grind or dash the life out of a man against these rocks in a few minutes. But many a man had slipped and hurt himself badly, and two fatally, on that cruel Black Rock.
Once a man of the village of Kilcash had fallen, broken his leg in two places, and been carried up the cliff path and across the downs to die. Another had slipped on the top of one ridge. For a moment his body swept backward in an arc like a bent bow, until his head touched the top of the next ridge behind. All his muscles instantly relaxed, his chin was crushed down upon his chest, he rolled for an instant into a shapeless heap, rolled down into the trough, and lay at full length with dead, wide open eyes turned upward to the sun. Several people had from time to time met with dire accidents on that dangerous slope by reason of the uncertain footing it afforded.