United States or Trinidad and Tobago ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
When the inhabitants of Plymouth, having vainly scanned the horizon for a sign of the tower on the following morning, put off to the rock to investigate, they found only the bent and twisted iron rods by which the tower had been held in position projecting mournfully into the air from the rock-face.
The road ran through a cutting, sunless, cooled by many small springs of water trickling down the rock-face, green with draperies of the hart's-tongue and common polypody ferns; and emerged again into warmth upon a curve of the hillside facing southward down the coombe, and almost close under the second span of the viaduct, where the tall trestles plunged down among the tree-tops like gigantic stilts, and the railway left earth and spun itself across the chasm like a line of gossamer, its criss-crossed timbers so delicately pencilled against the blue that the whole structure seemed to swing there in the morning breeze.
A man whose life we would save on the field, or the rock-face, or the sea, at the risk of our own lives or the more abominable peril of wound and agony, will die in a ditch of the Spotted Death or a fever before the most valiant of us would put out a hand to cover him again with his blanket He will get no woman to sound his coronach, even if he were Lord of the Isles.
From where I was it seemed that they were bent upon self-destruction, since the roar of the breakers beating upon the perpendicular rock-face appeared to offer only death to any one who might venture within their relentless clutch.
He crouched against the wet rock-face and listened. In that dark silence, poised 'twixt heaven and earth, he seemed a million miles apart from living soul. No sound, and yet the murderer must be there. Ay, there was the tinkle of a dislodged stone; and again, the tread of stealthy feet. The Killer was moving; alarmed; was off. Quick! He rose to his full height; gathered himself, and leapt.
Clinging there, its enormous pale-green eyes staring straight into Grôm's, it struggled to draw itself up all the way an effort in which it would doubtless have succeeded at once but for that first arrow in its entrails. The iron claws of its hinder feet rasped noisily on the rock-face. Grôm dropped his bow beside him and reached for the spear.
Then he cast about where he had best dwell; and he thought of the Isles of Sunset as a lonely place, where he might live and not be disturbed. There was the little cave high up in the rock-face, looking towards the land, to which he had once scrambled up.
It was on a ledge of that rock-face that our cave opened, and sometimes on a fine day Elzevir would carry me out thither, so that I might sun myself and see all the moving Channel without myself being seen.
The rain stormed at them from above; spat at them from the rock-face; and leapt up at them from their feet. Once they halted for a moment, finding a miserable shelter in a crevice of the rock. "It's a Black Killer's night," panted the Master. "I reck'n he's oot." "Ay," the boy gasped, "reck'n he is." Up and up they climbed through the blackness, blind and buffeted.
Above that dust a band of graybeards heaved upon a lever. They grunted and strained, with eyes staring and the sweat jumping forth on their foreheads. Then something gave. A great slice of the rock-face began to slip. Some of the toilers scrambled back to safety, their long, white hair flying behind them. But others, unable to recover themselves in time, fell sprawling forward.
Word Of The Day