CHAPTER III
THE HAUNTED CAVE
A sunlit sheet of sea, violet and azure, clothed in slender cloud shadows and heaving gently to the long Atlantic ground-swell. Up through the calm water, to meet the eye of the gazer, came the green clearness of stone, and blinks of unveined sand showing white between the brown tangled blades of the great oar-weed; and you might see a school of little cuddies, heads all one way, playing hide and seek in the sea forest, and caring no whit for the clumsy armored crab beneath them, who crawled sideways, a laborious patch of color in the shimmering transparency. Up out of the deep water the gray rocks rose clear and fine, a mass of platforms and pinnacles, roughened with barnacles and tufted with dulse, whose crimson leaves floated and swung in the white foam of the lisping swell; and above the rocks and beyond the sea's reach the cliff stood up black, showing all the strata that had gone to the making of it outlined with little patches of coarse grass. On one such patch grazed without concern a sheep which had slipped over, happy in her ignorance of the fact that she could never be drawn up again alive; the wiser raven overhead was clanging away with short barks to tell his mate. On a ridge on the cliff side sat a pair of young scarfs, almost invisible save when they twisted their long necks about like two snakes, trying to make up their minds to follow their mother, who had just flopped clumsily into the water, feet first, and had turned there and then into a miracle of easy grace, as she used her head to dash the spray over her back. Out at sea a solan rose steadily in a sweeping spiral, the white and black of him glittering in the sun; suddenly he checked, reversed engines, and fell plump like an inverted cross, his long raking wings clapping to as he struck the water; a moment, and he was up, and there sat, choking and gobbling over his fish, ere he rose again in his majestic rings.
The two children had grounded their boat on a little pebble beach between the rocks, and were sitting on a big tuft of sea pinks, munching handfuls of the sweet dulse and watching the solan at his fishing. They were by way of fishing themselves, but the afternoon was as yet too early and too clear for them. The Urchin had a pile of stones beside him, and was apparently trying to see how many times in twenty he could miss a large and obvious spur of rock. Fiona had a book of poetry, and was making intermittent efforts to read; but the world was too full of things to give poetry a fair chance.
The Urchin threw his last stone away.
"Silly sitting here," he said; "come and explore."
So, scrambling and sliding, the two made their way across the rocks, stopping at every rock pool to raise its fringe of weed with careful hands and investigate the wonder of the little world below; sea flowers of every hue, white and green, gray and orange, purple and white and gray and purple again, some smooth and satisfied, others with tentacles greedily awash, that could be induced to suck at a small finger dexterously inserted; sea shells of every contour, some living and clutching at the rock, some cast off and dead, others again protruding alien claws, resurrected to a life of artificial movement by the little hermit crabs whose tails they sheltered; here and there the spiky pink globe of a sea urchin, waiting for the tide to float him off. And in one deep little pot, with sides green like a grotto of ferns, they found a miniature battle. A small green crab, who had cast his shell, sat humped in a recess of the grotto, a thing soft and vulnerable, a delight to the enemy; and in front of him, excited and transparent, were half a dozen shrimps, the horn on each forehead pointed at him; from time to time some young gallant would dash in to prod the helpless monster, and at once backwater again into the ranks of his friends. The crab bore his torment with a patience born of the knowledge that each minute his new carapace was hardening; the shrimps had no wit to count the cost, or reckon the odds that the rising tide might bear them away in safety from the day of vengeance.
On hands and knees, not daring to breathe on the limpid surface of the pool, the children watched the little drama. From the cliff top the heated air rose dancing into the sky. So still were earth and air and sea that the old finner's rise sounded as though the cliff were falling. He had worked nearer in to the rocks than seemed possible for his ninety feet of blubber and muscle, and as his black side rolled over, the water about him boiled like a pot; but he did not splash, for he had been well brought up and always knew what his tail was doing, though it was so far away.
"Shiver these rocks," he began in a rage, as he flung two fountains out of his nose. Then he caught sight of Fiona and the gleam of the red bracelet.
"Oh my fins and flippers!" he spouted. "I ask pardon, young lady; I haven't the manners of a grampus. And they told me about you."