POINT VIGNETTE
Le Creux cavern, a great hole 100 feet deep, and opening above on the hill, yawns on the beach. At high-water a boat can be pushed into this cauldron, which is a perfect miniature of the famed Buller of Buchan in Scotland. Point Vignette, La Terrible, or La Conchée, lifts its proud pinnacles beyond this. Les Burons and La Moie lie off the cliffs. Then comes a black ridge, looking like porphyry, termed, we believe, La Chateau. It bounds the only little cave, L’Eperquerie—Paregorois—Port Gourey, in which boats may be sheltered and moored. Into this caverned cave of green velvet it was our fortune to descend during one of the severest gales, the rolling foam beautifully contrasting with the black-green rocks. The small boats were dancing high on the liquid mountain, and even the cutters and a lugger were rocking and dipping their bows in the water, and yet at the time the water in this cave, and in Creux also, was the calmest around the islet. The group of fishermen below us on a rock-ledge were seemingly in dilemma for ourselves. It was a most perilous footing; so boisterous was the blast around the rocks, that we were compelled to cling to the rocks, and several of our hapless sketches were wafted aloft in a moment. The sailors seemed to think us wild, and to wonder how and whence we came, and, indeed, why we came at all; and yet this was what we hoped to see—a calm would have tamed the scene down to insignificance. Close to the landing-place and the off-lying rock it is all perfect studies. We have La Chapel de Meuve, a square block of pendant granite, as if momentarily about to fall. The range of rocks on the eastern coast consist chiefly of sienite. We have now well-nigh rounded the islet of Serk, a complete embarras de richesse; one glimpse of these rocks taken at random were worth a day’s journey.
Hark! amid the howling of the wind there is the scrape of a fiddle—shade of Straduarius, a cremona in Serk! A band of wandering minstrels are wind-bound in the islet, and in sympathy they are about to invoke Terpsichore in a stable-loft, approached by a narrow mud path, beneath a dripping hedge and a muck-heap! And there is the fair, the fairest maid in Serk, Fanny, of whom it is the fashion to talk, flirting in very accomplished style, raising flames of jealousy among the juveniles who resort to Mrs. Hizzlehurst’s hotel. It was a very fair bit of romantic burlesque, and took.
We are in Serk four days more than we had contemplated; the pressure of harvest binds us in the islet; all hands to the sickle and the sheaf. Boreas, however, had the credit of our imprisonment; yet we regret it not—almost every waking hour was passed in contemplation of some fresh beauty. The bracing breeze of health, the complete retirement—solitude, if you will—the absence of all mere holiday intrusion, the instant transition from our hostelry into the midst of romantic beauty, to be admired or studied as the fit may work, and, withal, the order of domestic economy, all mark this little islet as the perfect home of the student who is reading or writing—of the romantic wanderer—of the artist—of the geologist—of all, indeed, who love to revel in wild and unspoliated nature.
Adieu! beautiful Sark, we shall not soon forget your perfection; adieu! for yonder lies the “Lady” of the islet, in whose bosom we are to be wafted off to Guernsey with the market-people who wend to St. Peter’s Port to replenish the exhausted stores of the islet. Romance itself must be fed, it cannot live on flowers: and so, at five in the morning, in bright moonlight, amid a bevy of visitors and a group of Serquois peasants, we have passed the portal of the rocks, and wait on the beach to be rowed to the cutter in the cove—wind, tide, and currents dead against us; so, to gain an offing, we make the tour of the island, and by a long tack of three miles run up the Great Russell and round Castle Cornet into the haven of Sarnia.
And now, still further southward, we are nearing the fairest islet of the Channel, and after the circuitous struggles of our voyage from Serque, with all the charm of contrast, we overcome time and space with almost a certainty of progression. We chuckle at this triumph of vapour over the gales, yet with time to spare, and with wind and tide and current in our favour—a very rare coincidence in the Channel seas—we would yet prefer to hoist our canvas, and skim leisurely over the glittering waves to Jersey.
JERSEY