"CHAIR LADDER."
The point of Carn Guethensbras, the "Great Carn," juts out beyond Chair Ladder, and encloses Porthloe, the "Lake Port." It was here that the homeward-bound sailing ship Khyber, from Australia, was cast away in March 1905, and twenty-three of the twenty-six aboard were drowned. An Admiralty signalling station has since been established on the cliffs.
I was walking here in August 1909, and two men came hurrying out of the signal-station.
"Are you a doctor, sir," they asked.
I felt unreasonably ashamed that I was not.
"What's the matter?"
"Why, 'zno, a man, one of a party camping tu Porth Gwarra, runnen along th' cliffs, has fell'd down a hunner 'an twenty feet, an' scat's head all to bits, an' we'm most at our wits' end what to du."
It seemed, hearing a report like this, that there was really nothing to do but hold an inquest; but doctors had been telegraphed for to Penzance, and when at last they arrived, the man was not dead. It was a marvellous escape. Falling down the jagged rocks, into a place difficult of access, from which the coastguard only brought him up on a stretcher after great exertion, he was not killed outright; and indeed, according to later advices, eventually recovered.
A lovely nook opens out beyond Pendower Cove, at Nanjizel, or Mill Bay, where there is a natural archway and a tall rifted cavern in the headland of Carn-les-Boel, known as the "Song of the Sea," perhaps the most entirely beautiful and romantic cave in Cornwall.