The car stopped, and the two friends descended.
"It's only a few hundred yards from this to the cliff over the Black Rock," said the driver. "But it's lonely there on a day like this. Don't go down. Don't trust yourself on that rock a day like this. She may begin any minute a day like this, and if she catches you between her and the water, you're dead men."
The two friends struck across the downs, the younger leading the way.
CHAPTER XXII.
[THE ROCK.]
Here was the dull blue wintry sea under the dull gray wintry sky. No wind blew, no rain fell. A thin, soft sea moisture rose from the sea and met a thin, soft cloud moisture descending from the clouds. The long, even roller of the Atlantic stole slowly, deliberately, sullenly, from the level plains of the ocean, growing to the eye imperceptibly as it came. The water was thickly streaked with tawny, vapid froth; the base of the high, impassable, brown rocky coast was marked by a broad but diminishing line of yellow foam.
No bird was visible in the air, no ship on the sea, no living creature on the land but the two men, O'Hanlon and O'Brien. A mile inland stood lonely Kilcash House, which had for years been the home of the dead man and his beautiful wife. Below, between the towering, oppressive, liver-coloured cliffs and the foam-mantled, blanched blue sea lay the Black Rock, a huge, flat, monstrous table cast off by the land and spurned by the sea.
For a while the two men stood speechless on the edge of the cliff overlooking the barren waste of heaving waters and the sullen ramparts of indomitable heights. The deep boom of the bursting wave, the roar of the outwashing boulders, and the shrill hiss of the falling spray, made the dismal scene more deserted and forlorn. The sea and cliffs were forbidding to man. They seemed to resent the presence of man--to desire, now that they were not engaged in actual war, no intrusion on the lines where their gigantic conflicts were waged.
The Black Rock stretched out half-a-mile from the base of the cliff into the sea, and was half-a-mile wide. Above it the land was slightly hollowed towards the sea, and would, but for the Black Rock beneath, form a bay-like indentation in the shore. The chord of this arc was about six hundred yards, so that the greater mass of the Black Rock projected into the sea beyond the heads of the cliffs.
The Rock, as it was called for brevity in the neighbourhood, was only a few feet above the reach of the waves and broken water when a strong wind blew from the south-west. It shelved outward, and when the waters were very rough, when a storm raged, the shattered waves leaped up on it, and bounded, hissing in irresistible fury, towards the inner cliff, but were arrested, dispersed, and poured down the sides of the Rock ere they reached the inner cliff. The Rock was highest at the centre, and descended to right, left, front, and rear. But although it was lower at the rear than in the centre, it was much higher there than in front. Viewed from above, it was not unlike the back of some prodigious sea monster rising above the surface of the water. In shape it resembled a vast creature of the barnacle kind, the apex of whose shell would represent the highest point of the Rock, and the corrugations stand for the ridges and hollows of the sides from the highest point of the ledge to the lower ones.