THE CHASM OF THE BOUTIQUES. "The tide was still churning among its slabs and boulders."
And I went in, and found him sitting up in great excitement at all the talking. I shook him very heartily by the hand and clapped him on the back and told him how much we were indebted to him, and how it was his prompt warning that enabled me to get across to Herm before they set their patrol boats—and very briefly of what had passed and was toward, and so left him, content and cheerful.
My mother would have added to our supplies, but we had as much as we could carry, and enough, we thought, for the term of our probable imprisonment. So we bade her farewell, and went on across the fields, past La Moinerie towards the Eperquerie.
"We are going to the Boutiques," I said.
"My Boutiques," said Uncle George, with a laugh. And, instead of going on to that dark chasm whose steep black walls and upstanding boulders lead one precariously into the caves with which we were familiar, he turned aside to another narrower gash in the tumbled rocks, and we stood on the brink wondering where he would take us. For, well as we knew the nooks and crannies thereabouts, we had never found entrance here.
We stood looking down into the narrow chasm. The tide was still churning among its slabs and boulders, and the inner end showed no opening into the cliff, nothing but piles of rounded pebbles and stranded tangles of vraic. We thought he had made a mistake.
But he looked quietly down into the boiling pot below, and said, "We have still an hour to wait. The tide is higher than I thought." So we sat on the short salt turf and waited.
"Tiens!" said Carette, pointing suddenly. And looking, we saw three boats pull out from the channel between Herm and Jethou. One came past us towards the north-east, and Uncle George made us lie flat behind gorse cushions till it was out of sight round Bec du Nez, though by crawling a little way up the head we could see it lying watchfully about a mile away. Another went off round Little Sercq to stop any communication with Jersey. The third lay in the way between Sercq and Peter Port.
"M. Torode shuts the doors," said my grandfather tersely. "B'en! we will try in the dark."
Between the softness of the turf and the heat of the sun and my great weariness, I was just on the point of falling asleep, when Uncle George came back from a look at his cleft, and picked up his loads, and said, "Come!" and five minutes later we were standing behind him in the salt coolness of the little black chasm, among the slabs and boulders and the fresh sea pools. And still we saw no entrance.