Ascending the ledge to the eastern side of the Corbie du Nez or Grin, we come abruptly on a yawning cleft that nearly isolates the cape itself. Its aspect is formidable but its descent is easy, and it leads down to the mouth or funnel of the largest cave in the islet, La Boutique, par excellence. To reach an inner cave a barrier must be mounted. At high water, the billows, after dashing on the shore cliff, rush in with a thundering sound at two chasms on the north and west. At low water the inner boutique may be entered with a light; it is lofty, and on its surface there are a few stalactitic droppings and a sprinkling of ferns. There are smaller caverns in the cliffs. We come out on the broad bay of Banquette, and in the little cave to southward stand out in the most fantastic beauty the finest outlying rocks in the islet, Les Autelets—little altars: in complete contrast, however, one being a stupendous cube of Grauwacke on a very narrow base, the other a huge pyramid, on the ledges of which a flight of choughs and shags settle and roost in the evening. The overhanging cliffs are nearly perpendicular, and along their base lie around in heaps the most gigantic blocks of very variegated stones, black, red and grey; and unlike the angular blocks on the hills they are mathematically rounded off by the attrition of the waves. Among these rocks are deep pools of water, in which we may discover small crustacea, and rich varieties of the daisy actinia, the nereis, and holothuria, and other anthozoa. There is one flaunting in bright orange, and yonder crawls the hermit crab that seems to have perforated an actinia within a shell, the tissue of the anemone forming a ring round the crab. Many of the blocks are richly clothed with fucus spiralis (bladdervraich) and crithmum (samphire) in all their splendour of gold and bronze. We must be wary, however, in paddling over these slippery carpets, a fall from them is not a trifle. Chondrus membranifolius, and pink and green polysyphonia and dasya are hanging on the cliffs, and the ulva and porphyra, oyster-green, and purple laver on the deeper rocks. The blocks are studded with minute univalves, and the patella shells of the limpet show like bosses on a shield.
Through a splendid arch of dark reddish sienite, marked by horizontal lines of schist, standing nobly out from the cliff, we pass into the next bay, the most magnificent in Serque, Porte Meullin. It is a deep wide cave, overfrowned by cliffs of clay shale 300 feet high, that come down perpendicularly on the beach. On their sides and brow zigzags are cut, by which the summit is gained, and from it we look down on the most splendid grouping of the islet. A cleft on the south side of Port Meullin sets off an isolated rock of very quaint form, and leads to another fine cave with chaotic blocks and pools, a lofty pinnacle towering above the cleft, and a wide cavern yawning in the islet rock. These rocks are bronzed by masses of golden gelatine, laminaria bulbosa, and fucus canaliculatus.
Among these ferruginous blocks, talc and asbestos and agate chalcedony, green, red, and yellow jasper may be discovered, and veins of lapis ollaris running across the islet.
During the western gales—and we now encountered one of the most determined violence—the waves roll into Port Meullin a profusion of the most magnificent algæ or weeds that we have beheld. In a few minutes we selected and displayed on the pebbles half a score of splendid specimens, a complete museum of sea treasure. There was a gigantic flag, six yards long, of rich sienna brown with a fringe of pink, covered with white spots, laminaria saccharina, or sea hanger. There were the fleshy fans of nitrophyllum; long brown ribbon slips six or eight in a bunch, asperococcus and rhodomenia; bunches of golden pods or bladders at the end of narrow leaves, fucus spiralis; huge bunches of broad reddish leaves, like those of the oak, delesseria sanguinea; eight or ten ribbon thongs, six feet long, on a thick brown stem, laminaria digitata (they might be a cat-o’-nine-tails for the backs of the Nereids); filigree weeds of the purest pink and white, polysyphonia and dasya; very long, tough, gelatinous brown thongs in a bow, chorda filum, sea whip-lash, and the purple iridea. The heath brows over this lane are clothed in corresponding luxuriance. There were at least three species of erica, a profusion of spurges, aspidia, and asplenia ferns; ophioglossum, adder’s-tongue, and an adiantum, maiden-hair fern, and dwarf polypodium were springing from the stunted stems, and little tufts, like codium bursæ, green purse-moss, and all these among clumps of thrift and chicory, and dwarf thistles, and wild sage and spinach, and vaccinia. We could not light on the stramonium, wormwood, or canna indica, which we were told now grew wild in the islet.
Couleur de rose will ever gild our memory of Port Meullin. It was the scene of our first grand impression of the extreme beauty of Serque; but it was gilded by a sentiment somewhat beyond mere admiration. From another point, a very courteous gentleman left his islet villa, and his lady and his luncheon, and guided us to the descent, where a bevy of fair girls, in all the romance of elegant deshabille, were gathering weed and pebbles among the rocks. Charming! Look across from Port Meullin to Havre Gosselin; there is a green fissure in the cliff 200 feet in height, as if the rocks had quarrelled and fallen away from each other—it is the Moie du Mouton, and along it sheep are lifted to browse on the green down above.
LA COUPÉ
And there on the right stretches the bold isolated rock, Brechou, or L’Isle de Merchant, a table of rich mould on a belt of flat rock. On its southern side yawns a very lofty chasm. We longed to pore into it; but the currents daunted even the boatmen of Serque. Round the point of Lionee opens the wide bay of Le Grand Grève, divided from the opposite bay by that most eccentric wall of rock 200 feet high and 6 feet thick on its ridge. This coupée, thus pared down for safety and for traffic, is chiefly of sienite or hornblende granite, traversed by a vein of porcelain clay, and it divides the islet into Great and Little Serk. This, perhaps prudent cutting down, has, however, shorn the guide-books of the high-flown epithets of “awe” and “terror,” which they affirm must strike the adventurer from Great to Little Serk. This peninsula, presq’île du petit Serque—wears a dreary aspect on its face; yet parterres of the most splendid ericas here and there adorn its soil—a little nest of cots and some scattered ruins of miners’ huts display a curious contrast of vitality and desertion. The southern point is the mining district; and though they have quite abandoned the search for ore, the superficial barrenness is perfectly consistent with mineral impregnation below. Our research for mollusca was more fertile in the pools about the southern point than elsewhere. As we round the point we come on a little bay, the avant courier of a splendid succession of coves and clefts on the eastern coast, and lying off this southern point peers up the bold rock L’Etat du Serq. Every brow on this deeply indented shore should be rounded and scaled and descended, as far as the worn or stony path can be traced, and then we look directly on the face of the cliff and into the caverns. There is one cave especially, called, we believe, Le Pot, as fine as can be imagined—the boldest feature of Little Serk, and on these rock-brows the lichens are in beautiful profusion, and the grey and yellow cetraria, and the fleshy sycophorus deformis.
We now come round to the eastern cliff of Coupée Bay, its extraordinary wall lifting up its causeway almost in the clouds. Beyond, the next headland opens on us the fine bay of Baleine, or Dixcard, the holiday spot of the islet. It is carpeted by white sand, on which small boats may be pushed in calm weather; it is the bathing-place of the visitors, whose half-mile walk from the hotel is chiefly on the greensward, and there is an arched cave in a pinnacle for our disrobing. Every step on this bold shore displays a fresh picture.
