Still, I was not yet out of the trouble. Thorgils had gone to some
place that I knew nothing of, and I had yet to learn if there was
any hope from Evan's shore going, which might make things easier or
might not. I could hear no one moving about the ship, so I pushed
the door open for an inch or two, and looked out into the
moonlight, with my drawn sword ready in my hand.
We were in a strange place. The ship's bows were landward, so that
as I looked aft I could see that we lay just inside the mouth of a
little cove, whose guarding cliffs towered on either side of the
water for not less than ten-score feet above the fringe of
breakers, falling sheer to the water with hardly so much as a
jutting rock at their feet. There was no sign of house or man at
the hilltop, so that it was plain that we were not at Tenby.
Then I was able to see that we were alongside a sort of landing
place that was partly natural and partly hewn and smoothed from the
living rock into a sort of wharf at the foot of the cliff. From
this landing place a steep road, hewn with untold labour at some
ancient day, slanted sharply upward and toward the head of the cove
along the face of the rocks, which were somewhat less steep on this
side than across the water. I could not see the top of this road,
but no doubt it was that along which Thorgils and the princess had
gone, and no doubt also Evan thought to carry me up it before long.
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