The Start projects far out to sea, a dark mass of gneiss rock with quartz veins. It is in the uncomfortable shape of a razor-backed ridge, with demoniacal-looking humps, spires, and spines of iron-hard rock, ranging from prominences like the vertebræ of a crocodile’s back to sharp points in the likeness of hedge-stakes. The weird imagination of Doré never conceived anything in scenery more shuddery than that of the Start, and the coastguards, who declare that you have not seen England until you have come to the extremity of this difficult point, are not without some reason for their cryptic saying. [Illustration: THE START.] It behoves the stranger to be careful how he comes to his exploration, for this, Λ, is the section of the Start. Sloping sides of short slippery grass at an alarming angle descend dangerously to the sea from the serrated skyline, and a false step will send you rolling down to those rocks that have proved fatal to full many a shipwrecked mariner. It is some sixty years since the lighthouse at the extremity of the point was built. The lantern of it is two hundred feet above the sea; and shows two lights, lit every evening, ten minutes before sunset: a revolving beam once every minute for vessels out in the Channel, and a constant fixed gleam for shore-going boats, to warn them off the Skerries bank. But, for all these safeguards, the Start remains a fatal point. When a “snorter” from the south-west, or a fog, sends vessels out of their course upon this coast, they are doomed. The lights are next to useless in foggy weather and at such time the fog-horn, bellowing in unearthly manner, is fraught with every kind of tragical suggestion. Among the many wrecks of modern times is that of the _Spirit of the Ocean_, March 23rd, 1866, when twenty-eight out of thirty were drowned, the _Gossamer_, China tea-clipper, driven ashore between the Start and Prawle Point in December 1868, when thirteen of a crew of thirty-one were lost; the _Emilie_, laden with saltpetre, broken up during a fog in June 1870; and the _Lalla Rookh_, a large vessel, coming home from Shanghai, laden with 1,300 tons of tea and 60 tons of tobacco, wrecked in March 1873 near Prawle Point. Shortly before the vessel struck she ran so close to the rocks that four of her crew jumped on to them as she flew by; but this was a wreck which did not touch the deepest note of tragedy, for in the end, all but one of those on board were saved. There was, however, a woeful waste of cargo, and the little beaches near by, and the long three miles of Slapton Sands, were for days strewn in places with the wreckage of the _Lalla Rookh_, and ridges of tea eleven feet high, and trails of tobacco of almost equal size, were piled up at high-water mark by the waves.