At Bushmills the electric train stops. There you alight and take your seat in the car which brings you to the Causeway Hotel. Here, as the air is decidedly bracing, and the majority of the tourists English, luncheon is ready, as you may imagine. The classic salmon despatched in company with a glass of ale or porter, the only thing to do is to look to business and visit the marvels of the place. A wall, which the provident administration of the hotel have raised for purposes of safety, hides them as yet from your sight. When you have passed that obstacle you find yourself within a sort of circus, delineated by the cliffs, and at the extremity of which descends a path that looks anything but safe. Total absence of causeway. Where must we look for it? This a swarm of guides, cicerones, boatmen, beggars of all descriptions, offer to show you. They all speak at the same time, fight, wrangle, make you deaf with their jabbering. Wise is he who sends them to the devil, and follows peacefully the pathway which goes to the extremity of the circuit, turns alone round the foot of the cliff on the right, and penetrates, unaccompanied, into the neighbouring bay. He will have the joy of a powerful, wholly personal sensation, unalloyed by any impure element. But alas! how is one to guess that? You think you are doing the right thing in giving the lead to a professional guide. You choose among the howling crew the less ruffianly face, and you deliver yourself into the hands of a cicerone. Fatal error! Henceforward you cease to belong to yourself. You are no longer a being endowed with reason and volition, with the free exercise of your rights; you are an article of luggage in the hands of a porter, a disarmed traveller in the power of a Calabrian desperado.
Instead of taking you to the bay on the right, the arbiter of your destiny begins by laying down as a dogma that the only means of seeing the causeway properly is to approach it by sea. On the same occasion you shall visit the marine caves. Allured by that programme, you follow the man, and you embark with him in a boat rowed by two oarsmen, who greet your advent rapturously.
Five minutes later you find yourself in total darkness under the oozing vault of a cavern, where the fluctuations of the mountainous waves now let the boat sink suddenly five or six yards down, now heave it up against the roof, and threaten to shiver your skull to pieces. In the midst of that frantic jogging and tossing the guide lights up a Bengal flame, in order to display to better advantage the variegated tints of the damp walls, or, it may be, to create the said tints, if they do not exist. Then he lets off a pistol in your ear to awake the echoes of the cavern, which answer to the call with deafening unanimity.
This is the “psychological moment.” The rowers, laying down their oars, take off their caps and hold them to you, explaining at the same time that gunpowder is expensive. You hasten to accede to the request, and soon after you find yourself, not without pleasure, in the daylight again.
Not for long, however; for you are expected to do another cavern. You submit meekly to the programme. Again that homicidal tossing; another Bengal flame; a second pistol shot. This time the boatmen offer you a box of geological specimens. As it is, you happen to abhor geology; but how is one to resist people who have him in their power in a marine cave?
Liberation comes in time. You breathe again. The miscreants have the face to mention a third cavern! But this time you rebel. “No more caverns! The causeway instantly!”
You double a little promontory, and after two or three oar-strokes you land on what seems to you at first a quay with a pavement made with hexagon slabs.
“Here you are, sir! This is the Giant’s Causeway.” Let us confess it candidly: the first impression is disappointment. Is it then that famous Causeway, that unrivalled wonder? You are ready to believe in a mystification. But this is only a passing impression for which the guides, not the Causeway, are responsible.