‘I wonder if we could get admittance to see the interior,’ he then said.
‘Not worth while to lose time, uncle; I want to get on to the lighthouse—Roche’s Tower; I can see its nose peeping over there.’
They found, however, that the goal of their enterprise was further than it looked; there was a glen to be crossed by a narrow path leading down along the cliff past some hovels in the bottom, over a watercourse purling through large shingle, then up the opposite slippery ascent, until they scrambled over a low rough wall at the top, and found themselves on an undulating down without furze, where a few cows were grazing, with the little promontory of Roche’s Point, its lighthouse and other buildings lying below them to the right, while the squat white column of Roche’s Tower rose some distance in front, that is, to the south-east, on the very edge of the high down, looking upon the ocean. Reaching it at last, they found it had none of the imposing appearance it had worn when they saw it through the fog from the steamer’s deck; it was merely a primitive round watch-tower or lighthouse some thirty-five feet high and perhaps fifteen thick, made of white stone or white-washed, with a tall signal-staff standing near on its right or western side. Fancies apart, a more common-looking group of objects could hardly be met with.
‘Well, seer, and here you are at last,’ said Mr Bristley, out of breath by the pace at which his niece had hurried him to the lighthouse, ‘here you are at last on the hill of the dream, as you ordain it, and with the veritable tower itself in stern and stony reality before you! Why don’t you apostrophise it, and say with Macbeth:—
The armed rhinoceros, or the Hyrcan tiger;
Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves
Shall never tremble.”
