Then he began to climb the rock.  He did not tarry this time for breath nor shelter, though the wind had no whit abated, but trod right on till he reached the spot where the catastrophe which had been so near fatal to him had occurred.  “It was a narrow escape,” mused he, looking down upon the place, not without a slight shudder.  “What odd things come into the head when Death is whispering in the ear!  If it had not been for my fair guide, where should I have been by this time?  Beneath the sea, for certain.  But what else?  How strange it seems that if there is any ‘else,’ no one, from the beginning of time till now, of all the millions who have experienced it, should have come back to tell us!  And yet there was a man who came back from the grave once.  Who was he?  I recollect his picture by Haydon; his talk must have been better worth listening to than that of most.  Is nothing true that one hears or reads, I wonder?  Here is where I kissed her!  I wouldn’t kiss her again, if I had the chance; I swear I would not.  I am a good boy now—­all morality, if not religion—­for they do say that hell is paved with good intentions—­which seems hard.  If one is to be punished for one’s wicked thoughts—­even if they do not bear fruit—­it is surely but reasonable that one’s good ones—­even if never carried into practice—­should be set down on the credit side of the ledger.”

With an exclamation of contempt or impatience, he turned from the dizzy sight of cliff and sea, and shouldered his way through the wind-kept doorway on to the open summit of the rock.  It was a wild waste place indeed, yet not without ample indications of having been inhabited in days of old.  Low but massive walls sketched out the ground-plan of many a chamber, the respective uses of which could only now be guessed at.  But beneath one broken arch there was a heap of rude steps with a stone something on it, which Richard rightly imagined had once formed an altar.  Man had worshiped there thirteen hundred years ago.  Nay, not far off, and in the very centre of this desolate hold, there was a burial-ground, with a low wall of earth about it, which neither time, nor the curious barbarism which marks our epoch, had much defaced.  The archaeologists had been there, of course, and discovered evidence which had satisfied them of the presence of the remains of their fellow-creatures; but with that they had been content.  The dead had, for the most part, been left undisturbed in their rocky graves, to await the summons in the faith of which—­and perhaps even for it—­they had died.  For these were King Arthur’s men (as Richard had read)—­the warriors who had helped the blameless king “to drive the heathen and to slay the beast, to fell the forest and let in the sun.”

The lonely desolation of the place, and its natural sublimity, combined with the recollection of his late deadly peril, tinged the young man’s thoughts with an unusual seriousness; and yet he could not restrain the cynicism that was habitual to him whenever his attention was compelled to solemn subjects.