He struggles up the lane toward the cliff, and there pauses, gasping, under the shelter of a wall, trying to analyse that enormous mass of sound which fills his ears and brain, and flows through his heart like maddening wine.  He can bear the sight of the dead grass on the cliff-edge, weary, feeble, expostulating with its old tormentor the gale; then the fierce screams of the blasts as they rush up across the layers of rock below, like hounds leaping up at their prey; and far beneath, the horrible confused battle-roar of that great leaguer of waves.  He cannot see them, as he strains his eyes over the wall into the blank depth,—­nothing but a confused welter and quiver of mingled air, and rain, and spray, as if the very atmosphere were writhing in the clutches of the gale:  but he can hear,—­what can he not hear?  It would have needed a less vivid brain than Elsley’s to fancy another Badajos beneath.  There it all is:—­the rush of columns to the breach, officers cheering them on,—­pauses, breaks, wild retreats, upbraiding calls, whispering consultations,—­fresh rush on rush, now here, now there,—­fierce shouts above, below, behind,—­shrieks of agony, choked groans and gasps of dying men,—­scaling-ladders hurled down with all their rattling freight,—­dull mine-explosions, ringing cannon-thunder, as the old fortress blasts back its besiegers pell-mell into the deep.  It is all there:  truly enough there, at least, to madden yet more Elsley’s wild angry brain, till he tries to add his shouts to the great battle-cries of land and sea, and finds them as little audible as an infant’s wail.

Suddenly, far below him, a bright glimmer;—­and, in a moment, a blue-light reveals the whole scene, in ghastly hues,—­blue leaping breakers, blue weltering sheets of foam, blue rocks, crowded with blue figures, like ghosts, flitting to and fro upon the brink of that blue seething Phlegethon, and rushing up towards him through the air, a thousand flying blue foam-sponges, which dive over the brow of the hill and vanish, like delicate fairies fleeing before the wrath of the gale:—­but where is the wreck?  The blue-light cannot pierce the grey veil of mingled mist and spray which hangs to seaward; and her guns have been silent for half an hour and more.

Elsley hurries down, and finds half the village collected on the long sloping point of down below.  Sailors wrapped in pilot-cloth, oil-skinned coast-guardsmen, women with their gowns turned over their heads, staggering restlessly up and down, and in and out, while every moment some fresh comer stumbles down the slope, thrusting himself into his clothes as he goes, and asks, “Where’s the wreck!” and gets no answer, but a surly advice to “hold his noise,” as if they had hope of hearing the wreck which they cannot see; and kind women, with their hearts full of mothers’ instincts, declare that they can hear little children crying, and are pooh-poohed down by kind men, who, man’s fashion, don’t like to believe anything too painful, or, if they believe it, to talk of it.