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'Now we're going to Thibet, said the Man's Wife merrily, as the horses drew near to Fagoo. She was riding on the cliff-side. 'Into Thibet, said the Tertium Quid, 'ever so far from people who say horrid things, and hubbies who write stupid letters. With you to the end of the world!
There was a muffled report, a blinding smother of dust just in front of us, a crack, the noise of rent boughs, and about ten yards of the cliff-side pines, undergrowth, and all slid down into the road below, completely blocking it up. The uprooted trees swayed and tottered for a moment like drunken giants in the gloom, and then fell prone among their fellows with a thunderous crash.
That this inaccessible place was his home was certain. Boys bathing in the shallows up-stream sometimes caught a glimpse of him moving about among the bushes. And sometimes at night from far to the east a light could be seen twinkling half way up the dark cliff-side.
Evidently the poisonous vapours from the volcano had not spread their blight here, for the face of the precipice was bright with many flowers. So close in moved the boat that its occupants could even see butterflies fluttering above the bloom. But that which their eager eyes sought was still denied them. No opening offered in that smiling cliff-side.
In the morning the three comrades started on their journey again; but no one sped them on their way or watched them as they went. He lived in a hut on a jutting crag of the Cliff of the King. You could get to it by a hard climb up a precipitous pathway, or by a ladder of ropes which swung from his cottage door down the cliff-side to the sands. The bay that washed the sands was called Belle Amour.
Peter seized by the collar a puny, crooked creature, whom he scarcely stopped to look at, and held him, as one might a cat, over the cliff-side. "Swear you'll quit the island to-night, or I'll drop you," he thundered. The creature merely screamed for mercy, and seemed unable to articulate a sentence; while Louise knelt, clasping Peter's knees in an agony of entreaty.
And the rock went over, and rushed downward upon the Monster, and with mighty crashings, as it did grind and crush the face of the cliff-side with a quick and constant thundering. And I caught the Maid, as she did stagger upon that dire upward edge because that she had set her strength so utter to the endeavour, and the rock to be gone so sudden, as you do see, and she to be like to follow after.
Julius looked at him sadly and shook his head. "British phlegm! Sure we expected it but it kind of rattles me, all the same, to see it sitting there just where we expected to find it!" Tommy, whose calm was, perhaps, more assumed than natural, moved his feet impatiently. "Push on. What about the hole?" They scanned the cliff-side narrowly.
And as the mighty hill of the body did come into length against the great cliff-side, the Beast set the eye-stalks into this cave and that, as it did go, and into all crannies; and so lengthened upward very straight and monstrous and dreadful unto us, and did be as a white and mildewed hill, that had an horrid life.
The lurid light of it flashed a second on the trees and the burn as it passed, and flashed blinding on the eyes of Oyster as he stood erect on the cliff-side below, musket in hand, and faced the blazing apparition that charged upon him with the old Highland blood surging in his veins.
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