As day broke he knew exactly where he was, recollecting the rock as one to which he had before now rowed with one of the fishermen, the deep chasms at its base being a favourite resort of conger. Hard by were the two zorns to which they had made the excursion that day, and searched for specimens for his father’s hobby—that day when he had overbalanced himself and fallen in.
Those zorns! either of those caves would form a hiding-place.
“That is certain to be seen,” he said bitterly; and with the feeling upon him that even then some glass might be directed toward the isolated rock on which he sat, a hundred yards from the cliff, in a part where the shore was never bared even at the lowest tides, he began to lower himself into the deep water to swim ashore and climb up the face of the cliff in search of some hiding-place.
He was bitterly cold and longing for the sunshine, so that he might gain a little warmth for his chilled limbs; and under the circumstances it seemed in his half-dried condition painful in the extreme to plunge into the water again.
Half in he held on by the side of the barnacle-covered rock, and scanned the face of the cliff, nearly perpendicular facing there, and seeming to offer poor foothold unless he were daring in the extreme.
He was too weak and weary to attempt it, and he turned his eyes to the right with no better success.
“Better give up,” he said bitterly. “I couldn’t do it now.”
As he gazed to his left the rock, however, seemed more practicable. There was a chasm there, up which it would certainly be possible to climb, and, feeling more hopeful, he was about to make the attempt, when a flush of excitement ran through him. There in full view, not fifty yards to the left, was the zigzag water-way up which they had sent the boat that day toward the narrow hole at the foot of the cliff, the little entrance to the cavern into which he had swum, and there sat for his own amusement, startling the occupants of the boat.
“The very place!” he thought. “No one would find me there.”
His heart began to throb, and a warm glow seemed to run through his chilled limbs as, carefully picking his time, he swam amongst the waving seaweed to the narrow channel, and then in and out, as he had gone on that bright sunny day which seemed to him now as if it was far away in the past, when he was a careless, thoughtless boy, before he had become a wretched, hunted man.