444 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 



had seen but a few seconds before running wildly about the 

 deck, there remained not a trace ; and the saddened specta- 

 tors returned to their homes to say that all had perished. 

 Four days after, on the morning of the following Sabbath, 

 the sole survivor of the crew, saved, as if by miracle, climb- 

 ed up the precipice, and presented himself to a group of as- 

 tonished and terrified country people, who could scarce re- 

 gard him as a creature of this world. The fissure, which at 

 the top of the cliff forms but a mere angular inflection, is 

 hollowed below into a low-roofed cave of profound depth, 

 into the farther extremity of which the tide hardly ever pe- 

 netrates. It is floored by a narrow strip of shingly beach ; 

 and on this bit of beach, far within the cave, the sailor found 

 himself, half a minute after the vessel had struck and gone 

 to pieces, washed in, he knew not how. Two pillows and a 

 few dozen red herrings, which had been swept in along with 

 him, served him for bed and board ; a tin cover enabled him 

 to catch enough of the fresh-water droppings of the roof to 

 quench his thirst ; several large fragments of wreck that had 

 been jambed fast athwart the opening of the cave broke the 

 violence of the wind and sea ; and in that doleful prison, day 

 after day, he saw the tides sink and rise, and lay, when the 

 surf rolled high at the fall of the tide, in utter darkness even 

 at mid-day, as the waves outside rose to the roof, and inclos- 

 ed him in a chamber as entirely cut off from the external 

 atmosphere as that of a diving bell. He was oppressed in 

 the darkness, every time the waves came rolling in and com- 

 pressed his modicum of air, by a sensation of extreme heat, 

 an effect of the condensation ; and then, in the interval of 

 recession, and consequent expansion, by a sudden chill. At 

 low ebb he had to work hard in clearing away the accumu- 

 lations of stone and gravel which had been rolled in by the 

 previous tide, and threatened to bury him up altogether. At 

 length he succeeded, after many a fruitless attempt, in gain- 



