He found as he progressed, however, that soon, if he wished to
continue his inspection of the whole of the coast, he would, in any
circumstances, have to continue his walk more or less inland, since
now he could observe, by looking about, that the spurs ran quite out
into the sea, so that they hid each little bay from its neighbour on
either side of it. Consequently, if he wished to inspect the space
between each, he would have to mount to their tops and thus peer down
into the recesses that they formed. At present, however, there was no
necessity for him to do this. Still looking, he saw that there were
three more bays, or coves, which he could reach by walking between the
feet of the spurs and the water, the spurs stopping some yards short
of the gentle surf which the morning breeze was raising.
'Three,' he said, 'three. This one where I am now, the first; then two
more. And, after that, I must ascend and gaze down. There will be no
getting farther along the bank.'
So he entered the first cove, finding it as desolate and bare as the
others into which he glanced in his journey; bare of everything, and
with its white beach so void of all else but its own stones, that it
might, that morning, have been swept clean and clear. The second was
the same, except that here, upon its beach, there lay the long iron
shank of an anchor with one arm and fluke upon it, but with the other
gone. An anchor that, he knew at a glance, had never been made in
recent days--that, by its quaint form, must be some centuries old.
And, even as he continued his journey, he wondered how it had come
there, and if, in long-forgotten and unnumbered years, some toilers of
the sea had been flung ashore in this spot, and if this was all that
had been left by time to hint at the story.
Then he entered the third, and last, bay or cove which remained
passable by the shoreway--the last he would be able to inspect until
he ascended to the cliffs above.
As he did so he started--knowing, feeling, that beneath his bronze and
sunburn he had turned white--recognising that he was trembling with a
faint, nervous tremor. For this cove to which he had penetrated was
different from the previous ones; it ran back between the two spurs
which formed its walls until it merged into the wooded, grassy
declivity that sloped down from above, while, at the foot of that
declivity, was more grass forming a little carpeted ravine and,
growing on it, some of the island trees--orange trees, lemon trees,
even bananas.
And on the grass there lay a man. Dead or asleep!
A man, fair-haired, clad in a white drill suit with brass buttons--they
glistened now in the rays of the risen sun!--the white uniform of the
Royal Navy. A man who was Gilbert Bampfyld.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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