CHAPTER XX
IN THE CLEFT OF A ROCK.
HOW I LAY IN THE CLEFT OF A ROCK
On the third day of my confinement, and as near as I could tell about midday, the small round porthole of my cabin was suddenly darkened by a flap of sail let down from above, purposely I judged, and shortly afterwards I found the ship was at rest.
It was after dark when Torode came in, and, without a word, bandaged my eyes tightly, and then called in two of his men, who shouldered me, and carried me up the companion and laid me in a boat. The passage was a short one, about as far I thought as, say, from the anchorage at Herm to the landing-place. Then they shouldered me again, and stumbled up a rocky way and along a passage where their feet echoed hollowly, and finally laid me down and went away. Torode untied my hands and feet and took off the bandage.
By the light of his lantern I saw that I was in a rock room, with rough natural walls, and sweet salt air blowing in from the farther end. There was food and water, and a mattress and blanket. He left me without a word, and locked behind him a grating of stout iron bars which filled all the space between floor and roof. I was long past puzzling over the meaning of it all. I ate my food, and lay down and slept.
A shaft of sunlight awoke me, and I examined my new prison with care. It was a bit of a natural rock passage, such as I had often seen on Sercq, formed, I have been told, by the decay of some softer material between two masses of rock. It was about eight feet wide, and the roof, some twenty feet above my head, was formed by the falling together of the sides which sloped and narrowed somewhat at the entrance. In length, my room was thirty paces from the iron grating to the opening in the face of the cliff. This opening also was strongly barred with iron. The floor of the passage broke off sharply there, and when I worked out a piece of rock from the side wall, and dropped it through the bars, it seemed to fall straight into the sea, a good hundred feet below. The left-hand wall stopped a foot beyond the iron bars, but at the right hand the rock wall ran on for twenty feet or so, then turned across the front of my window and so obscured the outlook. I hated that rock wall for cutting off my view, but it was almost all I had to look at, and before I said good-bye to it I knew every tendril of every fern that grew on it, and the colours of all the veins that ran through it, and of the close-creeping lichen that clothed it in patches.