"O'Hanlon, you're not afraid to risk seeing anything--that thing again?" he asked at length--adding, "I want to have a look at the place."
The other hesitated a little before he drew himself up, and said:
"No. I may as well face it and be sure of the worst--be certain whether I am to end my days in a lunatic asylum or not."
The two men descended to the Black Rock.
CHAPTER XXIII.
[THE HOME OF THE MONSTER.]
It was now growing dusk. The loneliness of the place was extreme. A few sea-gulls were wheeling and crying in the dull air overhead. They had come back from their long day's fishing far out to sea and up and down the coast, and were leisurely wheeling, scouting, and sailing shoreward to their homes among the crags.
Nothing else stirred or broke the stillness, except the sea--the imperial, the insatiable, the eternal sea!--the sea that for ever chafes and storms, and seeks to eat away or overwhelm the land because it spurns and writhes under its function of merely filling up the hollows of earth and balancing the volume of the world.
If all the solids of the earth were turned smooth in the mighty lathe that drives the earth round its axis, then water would be supreme, and this planet would be a polished, argent sphere, flashing through interspaces between clouds as it spun and flew along the orbit of gold woven of light for it by the sun.
Day and night the waters work without ceasing to overwhelm the earth. Day and night the torrents tear down the sand and boulders and trees of the mountains and fling them into the hidden hollows at the mouths of rivers. All the deltas of the world are offerings of the torrents and rivers towards carrying out the grand scheme of the oceans metropolitan. Pool and tarn and lake and inland sea, and remotest waters that touch undreamed-of isles, are daily and nightly fretting or tearing away the uncomplaining shores.