第80章

A womans way.

Haggard cliffs,of every ugly altitude,are as common as sea-fowl along the line of coast between Exmoor and Lands End;but this outflanked and encompassed specimen was the ugliest of them all.

Their summits are not safe places for scientific experiment on the principles of air-currents,as Knight had now found,to his dismay.

He still clutched the face of the escarpment--not with the frenzied hold of despair,but with a dogged determination to make the most of his every jot of endurance,and so give the longest possible scope to Elfrides intentions,whatever they might be.

He reclined hand in hand with the world in its infancy.Not a blade,not an insect,which spoke of the present,was between him and the past.The inveterate antagonism of these black precipices to all strugglers for life is in no way more forcibly suggested than by the paucity of tufts of grass,lichens,or confervae on their outermost ledges.

Knight pondered on the meaning of Elfrides hasty disappearance,but could not avoid an instinctive conclusion that there existed but a doubtful hope for him.As far as he could judge,his sole chance of deliverance lay in the possibility of a rope or pole being brought;and this possibility was remote indeed.The soil upon these high downs was left so untended that they were unenclosed for miles,except by a casual bank or dry wall,and were rarely visited but for the purpose of collecting or counting the flock which found a scanty means of subsistence thereon.

At first,when death appeared improbable,because it had never visited him before,Knight could think of no future,nor of anything connected with his past.He could only look sternly at Natures treacherous attempt to put an end to him,and strive to thwart her.

From the fact that the cliff formed the inner face of the segment of a huge cylinder,having the sky for a top and the sea for a bottom,which enclosed the cove to the extent of more than a semicircle,he could see the vertical face curving round on each side of him.He looked far down the facade,and realized more thoroughly how it threatened him.Grimness was in every feature,and to its very bowels the inimical shape was desolation.

By one of those familiar conjunctions of things wherewith the inanimate world baits the mind of man when he pauses in moments of suspense,opposite Knights eyes was an imbedded fossil,standing forth in low relief from the rock.It was a creature with eyes.

The eyes,dead and turned to stone,were even now regarding him.

It was one of the early crustaceans called Trilobites.Separated by millions of years in their lives,Knight and this underling seemed to have met in their death.It was the single instance within reach of his vision of anything that had ever been alive and had had a body to save,as he himself had now.

The creature represented but a low type of animal existence,for never in their vernal years had the plains indicated by those numberless slaty layers been traversed by an intelligence worthy of the name.Zoophytes,mollusca,shell-fish,were the highest developments of those ancient dates.The immense lapses of time each formation represented had known nothing of the dignity of man.They were grand times,but they were mean times too,and mean were their relics.He was to be with the small in his death.

Knight was a geologist;and such is the supremacy of habit over occasion,as a pioneer of the thoughts of men,that at this dreadful juncture his mind found time to take in,by a momentary sweep,the varied scenes that had had their day between this creatures epoch and his own.There is no place like a cleft landscape for bringing home such imaginings as these.

Time closed up like a fan before him.He saw himself at one extremity of the years,face to face with the beginning and all the intermediate centuries simultaneously.Fierce men,clothed in the hides of beasts,and carrying,for defence and attack,huge clubs and pointed spears,rose from the rock,like the phantoms before the doomed Macbeth.They lived in hollows,woods,and mud huts--perhaps in caves of the neighbouring rocks.Behind them stood an earlier band.No man was there.Huge elephantine forms,the mastodon,the hippopotamus,the tapir,antelopes of monstrous size,the megatherium,and the myledon--all,for the moment,in juxtaposition.Further back,and overlapped by these,were perched huge-billed birds and swinish creatures as large as horses.Still more shadowy were the sinister crocodilian outlines--alligators and other uncouth shapes,culminating in the colossal lizard,the iguanodon.Folded behind were dragon forms and clouds of flying reptiles:still underneath were fishy beings of lower development;and so on,till the lifetime scenes of the fossil confronting him were a present and modern condition of things.These images passed before Knights inner eye in less than half a minute,and he was again considering the actual present.Was he to die?The mental picture of Elfride in the world,without himself to cherish her,smote his heart like a whip.He had hoped for deliverance,but what could a girl do?He dared not move an inch.Was Death really stretching out his hand?

The previous sensation,that it was improbable he would die,was fainter now.

However,Knight still clung to the cliff.