Red Head is about a pistol-shot from the Black Rock to the east. It is a tall, perpendicular red cliff, more than a hundred feet high, projecting from the land a few hundred yards, and rising up sheer out of deep water. In places it overhangs slightly--in places reclines. The rocks of which it is formed are in no place angular, show no sharp fracture, declare no brittleness in formation. They are rounded and smooth like the human hand, abrupt nowhere, save in their giddy descent to the water. The middle of the Head is cleft in two a hundred yards inward. This cleft is called the Gap, or the Red Gap, and is as wide as the nave of St. Paul's. At the depth of a hundred yards in the Gap the height of the opening suddenly grows less, and the mouth of a huge cave is formed by the precipitous sides, and an irregular, blunted, Gothic roof of the same firm, smooth red rock. The vast chamber, or system of chambers, beyond, is the Red Gap Cave, for brevity called the Red Cave. At the time appointed, O'Brien and Paulton found Jim Phelan and his mate Tim Corcoran afloat on the bay by the flat stretch of rocks which served Kilcash as a landing-stage. Billy Coyne had brought down a basket of food, some torches, a crimson light, and gun--the torches and light to illumine the gloom, and the gun to awaken the echoes of the vast vault. The day was fair and bright, with chill spring sunshine. Overhead vast fields of silvery white clouds stretched motionless across the full azure sky. There was no breath of wind, no threat of rain, no look of anger anywhere. The waters of the bay moved inward with a silken ripple that scarcely stirred the yawl as she glided slowly onward. When she reached the open water beyond the bay, and headed first south and then east, she met the long, even Atlantic roller, which glided towards her and under her as silently and gently as a summer's breeze. No sound broke the plenteous silence but the ripple of the water against the sides, the snap of the oars in the rowlocks, and the dull beat of the waves against the foam-footed crags. No ship, no boat, no bird was in view. The solitude of the air and sea was complete. The sounds of the sea on the crags seemed not the distant notes of opening war, but the soft prelude to long, breathless peace. They rowed in silence until they were close to the Black Rock, until it rose dark, inhospitable, forbidding above them. Phelan was on the stroke, Corcoran on the bow oar. The yawl was now abreast the point at which the Black Rock joined the cliff at the westward. There was no rudder to the boat. On that coast rudders are looked on as foppery. In smooth weather the stroke steers from the rowlocks; in a sea-way some one steers with an additional oar from the sculling notch. O'Brien and Paulton were aft, but there was no oar in the sculling notch to steer with.