He crawled to the further wall and looked over into a deep black gully,
some fifteen feet wide and perhaps thirty feet deep, into which, out of
a perfectly calm sea, most monstrous waves came roaring and leaping,
till the whole chasm was foaming and spuming like an over-boiling
milk-pan. In the middle of the chasm, for the further torment of the
waters, was jammed a huge black rock, against which the incoming green
avalanche dashed itself to fragments and went rocketing into the air.
The solid granite at the further end was cleft from summit to base by a
tiny rift a foot wide through which the boiling spume poured out to the
sea beyond.
But the marvel was where those gigantic waves came from. Save for the
dancing wind-ripples and its long, slow internal pulsations, the sea was
as smooth as a pond to within twenty yards of the rocks. Then it
suddenly seemed to draw itself together, to draw itself down into itself
indeed, like a tiger compressing its springs for a leap, and then, with
a rush and a roar, it launched itself at the rocks with the weight of
the ocean behind it, and hurtled blindly into the chasm where the black
rock lay.
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