I beheld the thing but for a moment; yet the horror of it was more than I could bear. A dizziness came over me, and I sank down in a swound.
It was early morning when I came to myself. A tumultuous and thundrous sound was in my ears. It was the clamour of the great waterfall, joined with the roaring of the sea.
A wind was sprung up, a high and rocking wind, that came in flurries, and swept round and round and in and out the bends and indentations of the cliff, to leap howling upon the giant headland. The sea, risen high upon the shore, gnashed and foamed in great breakers. But the sky was cloudless blue, and the firmament clear like crystal.
My face was wet with the flying scud; my clothes had dried upon me. I felt fresh and vigorous, as after deep sleep. I lay recalling the grisly happenings of the night; and, on the thought of the ghost face, a shadow and a chill came over me—yea, even in the warmth and light of the sun!
Yet, on a sudden, I took another kind of thought. Getting to my feet, I looked directly upon the cliff above the waterfall, and there was the face—ay, even as I expected! For now I knew what it really was: a sculptured face, vast and horrible, hewed out of the rock!
Yet even so, scarce I could bear to look upon it. It was vast; it was prodigious; it was a hellish thing! Never hideous gargoyle, never infernal ghost, or chimera seen in dreams, looked with an aspect so frightful and malign!
Who, I wondered, had conceived it, and whose hand had wrought it? And immediately I remembered those wondrous works of sculpture on the walls of Ambrose’s cell. Ambrose was the man!
This, then, was what had scared us on board the ship near out of our wits, and, no doubt, many another ship’s company besides; a sculptured face, the phantasm of a mind diseased, a nightmare made stone! And, by the same token, I perceived, what we had taken for flowing white robes of the figure was nothing else but flowing water, the water falling from the blow-hole beneath the visage from the high cliff.
As to the illumination, that did not stumble me. I had made it my play-game often, when a child, to cast a light reflected on a mirror; so an arc of the strange white light,[C] cast upon a mirror, and reflected upon the face and falling water, might well have served to create that ghostly appearance.