THREE-ARCH ROCKS 7 



A boat's keel was beneath me, but as I stood 

 out on the pointed prow, barely above the water, 

 and found myself thrust forward without will or 

 effort among the crags and caverns, among the 

 shadowy walls, the damps, the smells, the sounds; 

 among the bellowing beasts in the churning wa- 

 ters about me, and into the storm of wings and 

 tongues in the whirring air above me, I passed 

 from the things I had known, and the time and 

 the earth of man, into a period of the past, ele- 

 mental, primordial, monstrous. 



11 



I had not known what to expect, because, 

 never having seen Three-Arch Rocks, I could not 

 know what my friend the State Game Warden 

 meant when he said to me, " Come out to the 

 Pacific Coast, and I will take you back to your 

 cave days ; I will show you life as it was lived at 

 the beginning of the world." I had left my Hing- 

 ham garden with its woodchuck, for the coast of 

 Oregon, a journey that might have been com- 

 passed by steam, that might have been measured 

 in mere miles, had it stopped short of Three-Arch 

 Rocks Reservation, which lay seaward just off the 



