The bare walls around them were of brown stone, wet with the drip
of rains, and full of holes where the mortar had yielded and stones
had fallen out. Indeed the mortar had all but vanished; the walls
stood and the vaults hung chiefly by their own weight. By breaches
in the walls, where once might have been doors, Florimel passed
from one chamber to another and another, each dark, brown, vaulted,
damp, and weather eaten, while her father stood at the little
window she had left, listlessly watching the two men on the beach
far below landing the lunch, and the rippled sea, and the cutter
rising and falling with every wave of the flowing tide.
At length Florimel found herself on the upper end of a steep sloping
ridge of hard, smooth earth, lying along the side of one chamber,
and leading across to yet another beyond, which, unlike the rest,
was full of light. The passion of exploration being by this time
thoroughly roused in her, she descended the slope, half sliding, half
creeping. When she thus reached the hole into the bright chamber,
she almost sickened with horror, for the slope went off steeper,
till it rushed, as it were, out of a huge gap in the wall of the
castle, laying bare the void of space, and the gleam of the sea
at a frightful depth below: if she had gone one foot further, she
could not have saved herself from sliding out of the gap. It was
the very breach Malcolm had pointed out to them from below, and
concerning which he had promised them the terrible tale.
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