TOPOGRAPHY OF VICTORIA. 



379 





THE COAST AT CAPE BRIDGEWATER. 



In one direction Cape Nelson lifts its rugged 

 outline against the western sky, while in another 

 the eye takes in the graceful sweep of the Bay, 

 with Percy Island breaking the unwrinkled level 

 of the slumbering sea to the eastward, the Law- 

 rence Rocks, only two miles off, serving as a 



foreground. The far-distant line of the horizon is almost undistinguishable in colour from 

 the sky which bends down to it, and the whole scene is suggestive of drowsy languor 

 and dreamy reverie. 



Nelson Bay, shaped like a sickle, has Cape Nelson for its heft, and the cliffs, with 

 high land behind them, heavily-timbered in part, and in part covered with scrub, maintain 

 the same rugged character from point to point. Upon a platform of rock jutting out 

 into the ocean, like a vast bastion reared by Titanic might, stands the light-house, over- 

 looking a wide expanse of sea ; and, beneath that lofty ledge, there is 



A belt of dark-red storm-beaten crags, which grimly face 



The baffled billows that lie ever panting at their feet, 



Or gurgling in black-throated caves where still they moan and beat. 







On the western side of this peninsula, the coast-line bends backward slightly to the 



east, and the land dips downward to a semicircular ridge of sandy hummocks which 

 extend along the margin of Bridgewater Bay to a point almost exactly opposite to that 

 at which they have commenced, where a broader promontory opposes another fortress of 

 basaltic rocks to the impetuous and tempestuous seas, which come surging up from the 

 south-west under stress of foul weather. Bridgewater Bay is about six miles wide, but 

 its land-margin is nowhere more than two miles from the open ocean. The headland, 

 of which Cape Bridgewater is the south-eastern extremity, is barely a mile across at its 

 neck or junction with the main-land, and it rises nearly four hundred and fifty feet 

 above the level of the sea, at what may be called its point of greatest resistance to 

 the waves. Some of the most romantic coast-scenery in Victoria is to be found in this 

 locality, and to see it under its most impressive and imposing aspect, it should be 

 visited when the summit of the huge bluff is being swept by the skirts of the thunder- 

 cloud, and the tumultuous sea is flinging itself with all its might against the dark 

 masses of immovable rock which forms its base ; while " in many a spire the pyramid 



