The landlord laughed. "Mine prospectin's not in the way of a larned gentleman like yourself. Maybe it's as well. Mr. Helzephron has got two dogs he turns out at night, and terrible ugly customers they be. Mr. Vargus do tell me that they be Tibetan mastiffs, which am the largest dogs in the world. They look like a sour-faced Newfoundland with heavy ears, only bigger." I tramped away from "The Miners' Arms." Although I recognized the fact that we were only at the fringe of discovery, my mind was made up. Thick darkness surrounded me, but I was convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that Major Helzephron, and no other, was the man for whom the whole world was hunting. And as I thought of him and the crew of lost and reckless men who did his will, the fair landscape seemed to darken, the sweet airs to be tainted.... The path I traversed was the coastguard's path, as I could see by the white-washed boulders to serve as a guide by night. It was never more than two or three yards away from the brink of the savage precipices that fell for two hundred and fifty feet sheer to the water. The ocean was on my left; on the right the great hill, known as Carne Zerran, towered up, and the edge of the high moors cut the sky. On that side it was as though one were walking at the bottom of a cup. After about half a mile of the path, it suddenly left the cliff edge, and turned inland. For several hundred yards the brink was guarded by a semicircle of barbed-wire fence, which made it impossible to approach. A notice board informed the wayfarer that here, owing to old mining operations, the cliff was extremely dangerous. It looked so, indeed. The edge was broken and irregular. I saw that it ran out in a curious headland for a considerable way, a mere wall of rock with a razor-back path on the top, which curved round again and ran parallel to the cliff on which I was, making a mighty chasm from which rose the cries of innumerable sea-birds. There was a narrow mouth seawards, and another headland jutted out to make a cove like the one at the inn, though that, of course, had no winding cañon at the end. I crept up to the brink, where the wire fence began, and, lying down, with one arm round the first post, peered over. It was a terrible place. The rock overhung so for hundreds of yards that I could not see the bottom. But the other side of the cañon was clear to view, a great wall of black rock, where sea-hawks nested, and inaccessible to the boldest climber. To the right the cove seemed to be of fair size from horn to horn, but it was no tranquil spot like the one at the back of the inn. Even on a calm day like the present, the Atlantic ground swell poured in with tremendous force, and was broken with ferocious whirlpools and spray-fountains by toothed rock-ledges a foot or two below the surface. The smallest boat could not have entered Tregeraint Cove and lived there for a moment.