The cliffs, some thirty feet high where we stood, rose to some hundred at the mouth, in intense black and copper and olive shadows, with one bright green tree in front of a cave's mouth, on which, it seemed, the sun had never shone; while a thousand feet overhead were glimpses of the wooded mountain-tops, with tender slanting lights, for the sun was growing low, through blue-gray mist on copse and lawn high above.

A huge dark-headed Balata, {116a} like a storm- torn Scotch pine, crowned the left-hand cliff; two or three young Fan-palms, {116b} just ready to topple headlong, the right-hand one; and beyond all, through the great gateway gleamed, as elsewhere, the foam-flecked hazy blue of the Caribbean Sea.
We stood spellbound for a minute at the sudden change of scene and of feeling.

From the still choking blazing steam of the leeward glen, we had stepped in a moment into coolness and darkness, pervaded by the delicious rush of the north-eastern wind; into a hidden sanctuary of Nature where one would have liked to build, and live and die: had not a second glance warned us that to die was the easiest of the three.

For the whole cliff was falling daily into the sea, and it was hardly safe to venture to the beach for fear of falling stones and earth.
Down, however, we went, by a natural ladder of Matapalo roots, and saw at once how the cove was being formed.

The rocks are probably Silurian; and if so, of quite immeasurable antiquity.