And then, just where the glare of the lights and watch-
fires was most brilliant, there too the black shadows of the cliff
had placed the point of intensest darkness, lightening gradually
upwards right and left, between the two great jaws of the glen, into
a chaos of grey mist, where the eye could discern no form of sea or
cloud, but a perpetual shifting and quivering as if the whole
atmosphere was writhing with agony in the clutches of the wind.
The ship was breaking up; and we sat by her like hopeless physicians
by a deathbed-side, to watch the last struggle,--and 'the effects of
the deceased.' I recollect our literally warping ourselves down to
the beach, holding on by rocks and posts. There was a saddened awe-
struck silence, even upon the gentleman from Lloyd's with the pen
behind his ear. A sudden turn of the clouds let in a wild gleam of
moonshine upon the white leaping heads of the breakers, and on the
pyramid of the Black-church Rock, which stands in summer in such calm
grandeur gazing down on the smiling bay, with the white sand of
Braunton and the red cliffs of Portledge shining through its two vast
arches; and against a slab of rock on the right, for years afterwards
discoloured with her paint, lay the ship, rising slowly on every
surge, to drop again with a piteous crash as the wave fell back from
the cliff, and dragged the roaring pebbles back with it under the
coming wall of foam.
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