Winefred: A Story of the Chalk Cliffs

by S. Baring-Gould

For some time none could make out who he was; but the Captain of the Excise, who had a glass, exclaimed that he was Dench, the ferryman. Olver appeared to be panic-stricken to such an extent as to have almost lost his senses. Seeing the crowd he ran towards it, along the path from the cottage till he came upon the gap that was rapidly widening and dividing him at every moment farther from the mainland. He seemed as though on board a vessel that was being swept out to sea, and frantically strove to escape from her to those who stood on the wharf observing him. Down into the separating chasm eyes looked, but could not make out the bottom; the depth contained a tossing mass of crumbled chalk and erupted pebble, with occasional squirts of water, some two or three hundred feet below the surface on the land side. It was like a mighty polypus mouth that had opened and was chewing and digesting its food in its throat and belly.

Seeing this, mad with fear, shrieking like a woman, Olver turned and fled, to be again arrested by a mound that lifted before his eyes as though thrown up by a monstrous burrowing mole. Almost immediately this ridge changed its character, it split with a sharp snap, became a rent, and Dench's way was again cut off. Once more he turned, and this time ran in a seaward direction down the inclination, but when he caught sight of the churning water throwing up volumes of mud, and at the uprising slimy reef lifting itself out of the sea, he turned again, never letting go his hold of the bag, shrieking still, for in the unparalleled horror of the situation his brain had lost its balance.

Those who looked on at the frantic man knew that it was not within human power to aid him. It was a mighty arena, and the spectators contemplated the solitary flying wretch pursued to his death by the relentless, invisible forces of Nature. Now he sought the cottage. It seemed to him in his dazed condition that he might find shelter there. But the door had been locked by himself and the key cast away.

He stood and wiped from his brow the sweat that rained down and blinded him. And then a gleam of thought lighted his troubled mind. He considered that if he ran eastward and could outstrip the rent as it formed, he might yet attain solid and stationary land.

But those who looked on with bated breath and trembling pulses saw that the attempt must end in failure. Such as stood on the height in security roared out advice to him. He halted, looked in their direction, endeavoured vainly to catch what was said. Men yelled louder, waved their arms, but as none agreed in the advice tendered, the wretch was confused and not assisted.

He continued his run eastward, ran—ran with his full strength, and came abruptly on the edge of a mural precipice, with another world far below his feet covered with brushwood, from which he was cut off by a perpendicular escarpment like one of the walls of a crater in the moon. To that lower world he could not descend. Then again he turned to run in an opposite direction. To such as saw him he was like a fox throwing the hounds off his scent, doubling, retrieving, dodging, but always headed.

And now as he ran he was brought down by his foot suddenly sinking into a crack that was in process of formation, and which he had not seen in his precipitate haste. By the time he had extracted his leg, this crack had become a gash that descended into darkness.

Clinging to a bush, kneeling, as he withdrew his foot, he saw the crumbling chalk dribble into this depth below, and the thought quivered through him that he was going down alive into the bottomless pit.

Rendered crazy with fear he mounted a fragment of rock and saw about him the wreckage as of a world—prostrate trees, leaning pillars of rock, disrupted masses of soil, bushes draggling over to drop into the throats open to swallow them.

There was but one possibility of salvation open to him, to leap the chasm that divided him from the mainland at one point where as yet the width was not extreme, and the feat was not impossible.