Portland, greatly to the sacrifice of its wildness, exists now but for trade.  The coasts of Portland were discovered by quarrymen and plasterers towards the middle of the seventeenth century.  Since that period what is called Roman cement has been made of the Portland stone—­a useful industry, enriching the district, and disfiguring the bay.  Two hundred years ago these coasts were eaten away as a cliff; to-day, as a quarry.  The pick bites meanly, the wave grandly; hence a diminution of beauty.  To the magnificent ravages of the ocean have succeeded the measured strokes of men.  These measured strokes have worked away the creek where the Biscay hooker was moored.  To find any vestige of the little anchorage, now destroyed, the eastern side of the peninsula should be searched, towards the point beyond Folly Pier and Dirdle Pier, beyond Wakeham even, between the place called Church Hope and the place called Southwell.

The creek, walled in on all sides by precipices higher than its width, was minute by minute becoming more overshadowed by evening.  The misty gloom, usual at twilight, became thicker; it was like a growth of darkness at the bottom of a well.  The opening of the creek seaward, a narrow passage, traced on the almost night-black interior a pallid rift where the waves were moving.  You must have been quite close to perceive the hooker moored to the rocks, and, as it were, hidden by the great cloaks of shadow.  A plank thrown from on board on to a low and level projection of the cliff, the only point on which a landing could be made, placed the vessel in communication with the land.  Dark figures were crossing and recrossing each other on this tottering gangway, and in the shadow some people were embarking.

It was less cold in the creek than out at sea, thanks to the screen of rock rising over the north of the basin, which did not, however, prevent the people from shivering.  They were hurrying.  The effect of the twilight defined the forms as though they had been punched out with a tool.  Certain indentations in their clothes were visible, and showed that they belonged to the class called in England the ragged.

The twisting of the pathway could be distinguished vaguely in the relief of the cliff.  A girl who lets her stay-lace hang down trailing over the back of an armchair, describes, without being conscious of it, most of the paths of cliffs and mountains.  The pathway of this creek, full of knots and angles, almost perpendicular, and better adapted for goats than men, terminated on the platform where the plank was placed.  The pathways of cliffs ordinarily imply a not very inviting declivity; they offer themselves less as a road than as a fall; they sink rather than incline.  This one—­probably some ramification of a road on the plain above—­was disagreeable to look at, so vertical was it.  From underneath you saw it gain by zigzag the higher layer of the cliff where it passed out through deep passages on to the high plateau by a cutting in the rock; and the passengers for whom the vessel was waiting in the creek must have come by this path.