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They supposed that they were not half-a-mile from the scene in the pass where Nagen was being forcibly deposed from his authority: Merthyr borrowed Count Karl's glass, and went as they directed him round a bluff of the descending hills, that faced the vale, much like a blown and beaten sea-cliff.
In the sea-cliff about five miles north of Corrie, near the village of Laggan, strata of volcanic ash occur, forming a solid rock cemented by carbonate of lime and enveloping trunks of trees, determined by Mr. Binney to belong to the genera Sigillaria and Lepidodendron.
The outpouring of repeated streams of lava the showering down upon land and sea of volcanic ashes the sweeping seaward of loose sand and cinders, or of rocks ground down to pebbles and sand, by rivers and torrents descending steeply inclined channels the undermining and eating away of long lines of sea-cliff exposed to the swell of a deep and open ocean these operations combine to produce a considerable volume of superimposed matter, without there being time for any extensive change of species.
There is a colony of several hundred of them on the face of a sea-cliff a short distance above me. I see, at nearly all hours of the day, the black lines they make above the foaming breakers as they go and come on their foraging expeditions. In diving, they disappear under the water like the loon, and penetrate to as great depths.
The latter, whose site is by far the more picturesque and amene, lay upon a long tongue of land backing the slope of the sea-cliff, and attached to the low whitish hillocks and pitons rising down south. It is now a luxuriant orchard of emerald palms forming three large patches.
At this point on the face of the sea-cliff I was told that I should discover a grotta, one of the caverns which some think are indicated by Cassiodorus when he speaks of his fish-preserves. Arrived near the mouth of the tunnel I found a signal-box, where several railway men were grouped in talk; to them I addressed myself, and all immediately turned to offer me guidance.
Imagine an enormous sea-cliff torn out and broken down level with the sea, so as to leave a great scoop-shaped hollow in the land, with one original fragment of the ancient cliff still standing in the middle of the gap a monstrous square tower of rock, bearing trees upon its summit. And a thousand yards out from the shore rises another colossal rock, fully one hundred feet high.
At Meup's Bay, in particular, Professor E. Forbes examined minutely, in 1850, the organic remains of this group, displayed in a continuous sea-cliff section, and it appears from his researches that the Upper, Middle, and Lower Purbecks are each marked by peculiar species of organic remains, these again being different, so far as a comparison has yet been instituted, from the fossils of the overlying Hastings Sands and Weald Clay.
The frontage is mean as that of colonial ecclesiastical buildings in general, and even the epauletted facades of old Sao Paulo do not deserve a description. After the Ermida are more ruined houses and ragged plantations upon the narrow shelf between the sea-cliff and the sea: they lead to the hot and unhealthy low town skirting the harbour, a single street with small offsets.
Next after the fishing-boat which, as I said, in the architecture of the sea represents the cottage, more especially the pastoral or agricultural cottage, watchful over some pathless domain of moorland or arable, as the fishing-boat swims humbly in the midst of the broad green fields and hills of ocean, out of which it has to win such fruit as they can give, and to compass with net or drag such flocks as it may find, next to this ocean-cottage ranks in interest, it seems to me, the small, over-wrought, under-crewed, ill-caulked merchant brig or schooner; the kind of ship which first shows its couple of thin masts over the low fields or marshes as we near any third-rate seaport; and which is sure somewhere to stud the great space of glittering water, seen from any sea-cliff, with its four or five square-set sails.
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