Here, day by day, Hands took his solitary walk, or sometimes he would sit sheltered in a hollow of the jagged volcanic rocks which set round about the cove a barrier of jagged teeth. Down below him a hard, green sea boiled and seethed in an agony of fierce unrest. The black cormorants in the middle distance dived for their cold prey. The sea-birds were tossed on the currents of the wild air, calling to each other with forlorn, melancholy voices. This remote Western world resounded with the powerful voices of the waves; night and day the gongs of Neptune's anger were sounding.
In the afternoon a weary postman tramped over the moor. He brought the London newspapers of the day before, and Hands read them with a strange subjective sensation of spectatorship.
So far away was he from the world that by a paradox of psychology he viewed its turmoil with a clearer eye. As poetry is emotion remembered in tranquillity, as a painter often prefers to paint a great canvas from studies and memory—quiet in his studio—rather than from the actual but too kinetic scene, so Hands as he read the news-sheets felt and lived the story they had to tell far more acutely than in London.
He had more time to think about what he read. It was in this lost corner of the world that the chill began to creep over him.
The furious sounds of Nature clamoured in his ears, assaulting them like strongholds; these were the objective sounds.
But as his subjective brain grew clear the words his eyes conveyed to it filled it with a more awful reverberation.
The awful weight grew. He began to realise with terrible distinctness the consequences of his discovery. They stunned him. A carved inscription, a crumbling tomb in half an acre of waste ground. He had stumbled upon so much and little more. He, Cyril Hands, had found this.
His straining eyes day by day turned to the columns of the papers.