At last you have managed to get rid of them, and leaving the Causeway, you have climbed up the steep neighbouring cliffs. And now looking round, you are struck with stupefaction and rapture at the spectacle which offers itself to your eyes. That sort of quay or footpath you deemed at first mean or insignificant is in reality, when viewed properly, the most stupendous whim of nature. Imagine a formidable array of forty thousand columns of prismatic shape (some one gifted with patience has numbered them), rising tall and majestic, and pressed against each other so as to form a continuous, almost level pavement, which emerges from the sea like a quay of marble. The symmetry of that pavement is so remarkable, all those shafts of columns are so well clamped together, that it seems almost impossible to admit that this is not human work. You fancy you are walking on the hexagonal slabs of some Babylonian palace, whose walls the storm has destroyed. These paving-stones are neat and even, about one foot wide, and perfectly regular. Towards the middle of the quay they rise in a sort of swelling, which permits one to study their anatomy and to perceive that they are really formed by the section of as many upright parallel prismatic columns. There are three Causeways,—the Great, the Little, and the Middle Causeway. They occupy the centre of a semi-circular bay, formed by lofty cliffs, which let you see under a thin covering of clay and grass other rows of basaltic columns that show their profile, and have been called “the Organ.” On the right the bay is limited by a jutting rock, above which tower two or three needles—“the Chimneypots.” A local tradition relates that the Invincible Armada, driven against the cliffs by a strong gale, mistook the needles for the towers of Dunluce, and stormed them uselessly a whole day long. Beyond those basaltic piers a spring of sweet water forms the “Giant’s Well;” further on a rock, roughly shaped as a church desk, is called “the Pulpit.” All those sports of nature compose a whole truly unique and wonderful. Neither the Alps, nor the chain of the Andes, nor Mount Vesuvius, nor Etna, can give you such an impression of grandeur—are able to that degree to put you as it were into communion with the mysteries of labouring Nature. What strikes you further about those basaltic formations is that they are both colossal, like all works directly resulting from the great cosmic forces, and at the same time almost Greek by the quality and symmetry of their arrangements. For once the volcanos seem to have had the whim to work according to the canons of art. It is both human and super-human—verily a Giant’s Causeway!