Instead of taking you to the bay on the right, the arbiter of your destiny begins by laying down as a dogma that the only means of seeing the causeway properly is to approach it by sea. On the same occasion you shall visit the marine caves. Allured by that programme, you follow the man, and you embark with him in a boat rowed by two oarsmen, who greet your advent rapturously. * * * * * Five minutes later you find yourself in total darkness under the oozing vault of a cavern, where the fluctuations of the mountainous waves now let the boat sink suddenly five or six yards down, now heave it up against the roof, and threaten to shiver your skull to pieces. In the midst of that frantic jogging and tossing the guide lights up a Bengal flame, in order to display to better advantage the variegated tints of the damp walls, or, it may be, to create the said tints, if they do not exist. Then he lets off a pistol in your ear to awake the echoes of the cavern, which answer to the call with deafening unanimity. This is the “psychological moment.” The rowers, laying down their oars, take off their caps and hold them to you, explaining at the same time that gunpowder is expensive. You hasten to accede to the request, and soon after you find yourself, not without pleasure, in the daylight again. Not for long, however; for you are expected to do another cavern. You submit meekly to the programme. Again that homicidal tossing; another Bengal flame; a second pistol shot. This time the boatmen offer you a box of geological specimens. As it is, you happen to abhor geology; but how is one to resist people who have him in their power in a marine cave? Liberation comes in time. You breathe again. The miscreants have the face to mention a third cavern! But this time you rebel. “No more caverns! The causeway instantly!” You double a little promontory, and after two or three oar-strokes you land on what seems to you at first a quay with a pavement made with hexagon slabs. “Here you are, sir! This is the Giant’s Causeway.” Let us confess it candidly: the first impression is disappointment. Is it then that famous Causeway, that unrivalled wonder? You are ready to believe in a mystification. But this is only a passing impression for which the guides, not the Causeway, are responsible. The truth is, you must not approach it by sea if you wish to see it well. It is by land only that it can be understood, like a symphony which would lose half its charm if executed in the open air. The treason of the guides is so cruel that it really cries for vengeance and must be denounced.