“Caves are too dry, except at high tide,” said Francis. “And then they’re too wet. Much.”
“Not all caves,” Reuben reminded him. “If we was to turn and go up by the cliff path. There’s a cave up there. I hid in it t’other day. Quite dry, except in one corner, and there it’s as wet as you want—a sort of ’orse trough in the rocks it looks like—only deep.”
“Is it seawater?” Mavis asked anxiously. And Reuben said:
“Bound to be, so near the sea and all.”
But it wasn’t. For when they had climbed the cliff path and Reuben had shown them where to turn aside from it, and had put aside the brambles and furze that quite hid the cave’s mouth, Francis saw at once that the water here could not be seawater. It was too far above the line which the waves reached, even in the stormiest weather.
“So it’s no use,” he explained.
But the others said, “Oh, do let’s try, now we are here,” and they went on into the dusky twilight of the cave.
It was a very pretty cave, not chalk, like the cliffs, but roofed and walled with gray flints such as the houses and churches are built of that you see on the downs near Brighton and Eastbourne.
“This isn’t an accidental cave, you know,” said Bernard importantly; “it’s built by the hand of man in distant ages, like Stonehenge and the Cheesewring and Kit’s Coty House.”
The cave was lighted from the entrance where the sunshine crept faintly through the brambles. Their eyes soon grew used to the gloom and they could see that the floor of the cave was of dry white sand, and that along one end was a narrow dark pool of water. Ferns fringed its edge and drooped their fronds to its smooth surface—a surface which caught a gleam of light, and shone whitely; but the pool was very still, and they felt somehow, without knowing why, very deep.