Then it
closed again, and presently began to drift past him in strange whorls
and spirals, like hurrying ghosts wrapped hastily in filmy garments,
which loosed at times and trailed slowly over the rocks and caught and
clung to their sharp projections. Then the sun completed the rout, and
the mist-ghosts swept away towards France, harried by the west wind like
a flock of sheep before the shepherd's dog.
In the afternoon the heat grew so intense that he was driven to the
wells in the valley of rocks for a bathe, for there was no shelter
available, and his bee-hive was like an oven.
None of the pools was large enough for a swim, and it was more than a
man's life was worth to venture among the boiling surges of the outer
rocks. But he could at all events get under water, if it was only to sit
there and cool off.
So he stripped, and was just about slipping into a deep still bath,
emerald green, with a fringe of amber weeds all round its almost
perpendicular sides, when, glancing down to make sure of an ultimate
footing, his eye lighted with a shock of surprise on a pair of huge eyes
looking straight up at him out of the water.
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