The mist clung close about him, but had suddenly become luminous.  He felt as though he were packed loosely all round with cotton wool on which a strong light was shining.  It gave him a feeling of light-headedness.  Everything was light about him, and yet he could not see more than a couple of feet before his face.  The waves roared hoarsely below him, and once he had unknowingly got so low down that a monstrous white arm, reaching suddenly up out of the depths, seemed about to lay hold on him and drag him back with it into the turmoil.

He was panting and full of mist when at last he climbed the second great rock barrier and rounded the corner towards the south.

And as he sat resting there, the whiff of a westerly breeze tore a long lane in the white shroud, and for a moment he saw, as through a telescope, the houses of Guernsey gleaming in bright sunshine.  Then it closed again, and presently began to drift past him in strange whorls and spirals, like hurrying ghosts wrapped hastily in filmy garments, which loosed at times and trailed slowly over the rocks and caught and clung to their sharp projections.  Then the sun completed the rout, and the mist-ghosts swept away towards France, harried by the west wind like a flock of sheep before the shepherd’s dog.

In the afternoon the heat grew so intense that he was driven to the wells in the valley of rocks for a bathe, for there was no shelter available, and his bee-hive was like an oven.

None of the pools was large enough for a swim, and it was more than a man’s life was worth to venture among the boiling surges of the outer rocks.  But he could at all events get under water, if it was only to sit there and cool off.

So he stripped, and was just about slipping into a deep still bath, emerald green, with a fringe of amber weeds all round its almost perpendicular sides, when, glancing down to make sure of an ultimate footing, his eye lighted with a shock of surprise on a pair of huge eyes looking straight up at him out of the water.  They were violet in colour, protuberant, and malevolent beyond words.

He sat down suddenly on the baking black rock, with a cold shiver running down his back in spite of the scorch of the sun.  The utter cold malignity of those great violet eyes, and the thought of what would have happened if he had stepped into that pool, made him momentarily sick.

He had seen small devil-fish in the pools in Sark, but never one approaching this in size.  He crept away at last, leaving it in possession, and found a pool clear of boulders or caving hollows, and sat in it with no great enjoyment, wondering if the great unwholesome beast in the other would be likely to climb the cliff and come upon him in the night.  He thought it unlikely, but still the idea clung to him and caused him no little discomfort.  He blocked his door that night with great green cushions, though he felt doubtful if they would be effective against the wiles and strength of a devil-fish, if half that he had heard of them was true.