Towards dark the incoming tide began to hit the cliff base. Raft had taken the things from the bundle and had made her wrap herself in the blanket. “You ain’t used to the weather like me,” said he, “and this is nothing to bother about. Lucky it’s not blowing. Lucky we made this shelf. Hark at that!”

The first full blow of a wave hit the basalt below them with a heart-sickening thud; then miles of stricken cliff began to boom. The terrific corridor was no more, and between them and the Lizard point so many miles away to the east and the point of safety miles away to the west, there was nothing but cliff washed by sea.

“A rotten coast,” said Raft as they listened. “Only for this shelf we’d be down there.”

“We’d have been flung against the cliff and beaten to pieces,” said she.

“That’s so,” said Raft.

“When we get free from this,” she said, “let us keep inland. I don’t mind climbing over rocks, anything is better than the coast, under these cliffs.”

“We’ve got to keep pretty close to the cliffs, all the same, to strike that bay,” he replied, “hope it’s there.”

“It is there,” said she. “I feel—I know it is there and that we will find a ship. We are being looked after.”

“Which way?”

“We are being led. You remember when you saved me from dying in that cave, well, you were making for the bay then. If you had not found me you would have kept on and you would have crossed that plain where the bog places are, it looked the easiest way.”

“That’s so,” said Raft.

“Bompard was swallowed up there. You would have been swallowed up too; you were led to find me for both our sakes. Then, to-day, I could have gone no further only for you, and you remember how we thought of going back? This ledge was here waiting for us. It tells us we have to go on and be brave and everything will come right.”

“Well, maybe, you aren’t far wrong,” replied the other, “we’ve scraped through so far and maybe we’ll scrape through to the end. My main wish is to have a plank under foot again, there ain’t no give and take in land, I’m never surefooted on land, there’s no lift in it. I reckon I’m like one of them sea chickens not used to solid stuff underfoot. D’you know what one of them gulls does first thing he lands on board a ship by chance?”

“No.”

“He gets sick as a dog.”

The cliff had an echo which, when it was not answering some loud boost of the sea managed to return words, and between the smack of two waves the girl heard it remark something about a dog. But the echo of the cliff soon had its mouth too full to hold words. The sea now nearly at full flood was bringing big waves along with it. In the gloom they could see the racing grey ghosts, and here, on account of the curve, there was little rhythm in the sound of it that came like the continuous thunder of big drums. At their feet, like the licking vicious tongue of the roaring monster, came the continuous gash-gash of waves washing up and falling back.

The girl sat with the blanket around her leaning close up against the man. She felt as a person feels standing before the cage of a tiger uncertain as to the strength of the bars, sometimes a puff of wind brought a touch of spray on her face, whilst the continuous muffled thunder of the coast leagues seemed like the bastions of the whole world at war with the sea.

“There’s no call to be afraid,” said Raft. He seemed, by some special faculty, to be able to divine her feelings.

“I’m not exactly afraid,” she replied. “It’s just that everything seems so big—and those cliffs, now, even when they are hidden, they make one know they are there, they seem wicked and alive, yet not able to move.”

“You’ve hit it,” said he, “they’re for all the world as if they were looking at a chap. It’s a rotten coast, but it’s near high water now and the tide will soon be drawing out.”

This cheered her.

Then the whale birds began to cry and flit about. The whale birds are blind by daylight and their voices scarcely ever heard, they are the owls of the sea.

The girl talked about them for something to say, then she fell to wondering why on a beach like this there were no sea elephants. Raft explained “sea cows” would never come to a washed beach like this, there were no dry rocks for them to “hang about” on.

He had lit his pipe with the tinder box and the smell of the tobacco came good and comforting, the slap and dash of the waves sounded less vicious, too, as though the sea had done its worst to get at them and was foiled.

Then she said, apropos of nothing but the last of her wandering thoughts: “Have you ever seen a man killed?”

He laughed as though over some pleasant reminiscence. “Dozens.” Then he began to recall chaps he had seen killed, falling from aloft and otherwise. He had seen one hit the sea such a smack it split him open, and he had seen a chap under water being pulled to pieces by sharks just as terriers pull an old shoe.

Then he wandered off to a bar scene where a dago—it was at Nagasaki—had been drinking rice rum and knifed a man, a regular prosy old sailor’s yarn, with “I says to him,” and “he says to me” at every turn.

Then he found that she was leaning more heavily against him and was asleep. He put his pipe beside him and slipped an arm round her. Then, as though sleep were infectious, down he sank still holding her and there they lay. He snoring gently and she with her head pillowed on his chest.