“It is, except to McDonnells. I did not play on these rocks for naught when a boy. Only pick me out twenty resolute men, and bring them round secretly to the first break in the cliffs eastward. I shall be there.”
’Twas easy to find twenty men ready for the venture. Nay, the hard thing was to take no more than twenty, for a hundred were eager to come. No sooner were we started, than the main body, as agreed, leapt from their hiding-place, and marched rapidly on Dunluce.
Our guide took us a mile eastward of the castle, where at the head of the narrow gully that led from the cliff to the shore, stood Ludar, pistol in hand, waiting for us. He turned silently as we came up, and, motioning to us to follow, began at once the steep descent. The cleft was so narrow that one man could only lower himself at a time, and that swinging as often as not by his elbows and hands. For me it was harder work than for the active redshanks. As for Ludar, he stood at the bottom, while I, with half the troop growling at my back, was stuck midway. Yet we all reached the bottom in time; and as we did so, the boom of a gun from the rocks above us told that our men were already before the castle knocking for entrance.
Then we waded and scrambled in the darkness at the water’s edge, till we came to the base of the great black rock on which the fortress stood. Often we were wading waist-deep in the pools, and often on hands and knees drawing ourselves over the surf-swept ledges. Ludar seemed to know every step of the way, despite the years that had passed since as a boy he hunted there for sea-birds, nor was he in the humour now to slacken speed for us who knew not when we put out one foot, where we should land with the other.
Above us, the noise of the guns was already lost in the thunder of the waves as they echoed in the cave under the castle rock. It seemed, as we stood there and looked up, that not a foot further could we go. The great angry cliff beetled over our heads, and on its very edge, far above, we might discern against the gloomy sky the dim corner of a buttress.
But it was not here that Ludar meant us to ascend. “Now, my men,” said he, “put your powder in your bonnets and follow me.”
Whereupon he took a step up to his neck in the deep water, and started to swim. One by one we followed him, armed and clad as we were, into the angry surf. ’Twas a perilous voyage, and had not the tide been full and high above the rocks, we should not have come out of it, some of us, sound in limb or wind. Once or twice as I was flung upwards with a swirl almost upon the jagged cliff, I thought my last hour was come, and wondered whose eye would be dim at the news of my end. Then, when, with a like swirl I was heaved back into the safety of deep water, I thought what a big venture was this, and who would not follow when Ludar led?
So, I scarce know how, we rounded the mouth of that resounding cave and stood panting on the narrow ledge on the far side. I say, we stood—yet not all. Of the twenty-two men who had plunged, only nineteen foregathered at the far side.
“’Twas bravely swum,” said Ludar, “and though it has cost McDonnell three brave sons, it has won him Dunluce. I promise you, we shall go back by land.”
I asked him, where next? and he pointed up to what seemed a rock as sheer and threatening as ever we had met on the other side. Nay, on this side, the castle itself seemed to hang clean over the edge.