A flash, a peal—ay, all in keeping with the scene—the growl of thunder
completely around and above us, and the lurid gleam flings a sort of
spectral halo over the heavens. There are two intensely black clouds
sailing in contrary currents towards each other, like destroying
spirits. The flash from the Guernsey cloud charged highly electric
streams over to that from Sark. Guernsey comes out in bright light for a
moment, and then is lost. Sark is overshadowed, and looms out like a
great purple wall, the chiselling of its cliffs and rocks, that a minute
since showed like huge bastions and gables, is totally obscured. An
awful position, if we linger here, and yet the _mise en scène_ is most
magnificent—sublime. The storm instantly bursts on Grosnez, and we
brave its wild fury, to look forth on a glory from which Salvator,
Loutherbourg, and Turner might have drunk in ideas of elemental majesty.
A black and murky cloud settles round yon point of _Pleinmont_, a bold,
caverned rock of sharp sienite, shaking with its thunder the old fort
and drawbridge, and driving its flood across the bay of _Grève au
Laucheon_, and far into its caves of gloom, 400 feet deep. One of those
sudden transitions of electric storm brings out the brightest sunbeams,
and we look across yonder rocky dingle two miles away on the beautiful
cove of _Grève la Lecq_, with its barrack and hostelry. The sea is
rolling gloriously at high water over the rocks of _Les Deniers_, its
mountains of milk-white foam breaking on a floor of sand as white as
they, and thundering on the deep umber rocks, embossed on the surface,
and then rolling with a deeper roar into that yawning cavern on the
western cliff. Towering over the shore of the bay hang stupendous
cliffs, some 400 feet high. From the eastern mound over the _Crab
Caves_, _Catel de Lecq_, we look up the two dingles which come down,
rich in woodland, to the bay, just about an old grey martello: then by a
mere turn on the heel we are directly on the verge of a magnificent
cave, closed in by cliffs nearly 500 feet high, huge granite blocks
strewed around their bases, and more seaward a belt of white sand and a
beach of black pebbles. The scene is wild and rude as the Hebrides, and
where the rolling surge on the beach meets the transient flood of a
storm-cloud, it displays a picture almost as majestic as a sea-loch in
Skye.
[Illustration: CLIFFS NEAR GRÈVE LA LECQ]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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