noon
The isolated , spire-like crags that rise along its base , are so drilled and bored by the incessant lashings of the surf , and are ground down into shapes so fantastic , that they seem but the wasted skeletons of their former selves ; and we find almost every natural fissure in the solid rock hollowed into an immense cavern , whose very ceiling , though the head turns as we look up to it , owes evidently its comparative smoothness to the action of the waves . One of the most remarkable of these recesses occupies what we may term the apex of a lofty promontory . The entrance , unlike that of most of the others , is narrow and rugged , though of great height ; but it widens within into a shadowy chamber , perplexed , like the nave of a cathedral , by uncertain cross lights , that come glimmering into it through two lesser openings , which perforate the opposite sides of the promontory . It is a strange , ghostly-looking place ; there is a sort of moonlight greenness in the twilight which forms its noon , and the denser shadows which rest along its sides ; a blackness , so profound that it mocks the eye , hangs over a lofty passage which leads from it , like a corridor , still deeper into the bowels of the hill ; the light falls on a sprinkling of half-buried bones , the remains of animals that , in the depth of winter , have creeped into it for shelter , and to die ; and , when the winds are up , and the hoarse roar of the waves comes reverberated from its inner recesses , or creeps howling along its roof , it needs no over-active fancy to people its avenues with the shapes of beings long since departed from every gayer and softer scene , but which still rise uncalled to the imagination in those by-corners of nature which seem dedicated , like this cavern , to the wild , the desolate , and the solitary . There is a little rocky bay a few hundred yards to the west , which has been known for ages , to all the seafaring men of the place , as the Cova Green . It is such a place as we are sometimes made acquainted with in the narratives of disastrous shipwrecks . First , there is a broad semicircular strip of beach , with a wilderness of insulated piles of rock in front ; and so steep and continuous is the wall of precipices which rises behind , that , though we may see directly over head the grassy slopes of the hill , with here and there a few straggling firs , no human foot ever gained the nearer edge .