A DESPERATE VENTURE

From ‘Lorna Doone’

The journey was a great deal longer to fetch around the southern hills, and enter by the Doone gate, than to cross the lower land and steal in by the water-slide.  However, I durst not take a horse (for fear of the Doones, who might be abroad upon their usual business), but started betimes in the evening, so as not to hurry, or waste any strength upon the way.  And thus I came to the robbers’ highway, walking circumspectly, scanning the sky-line of every hill, and searching the folds of every valley, for any moving figure.

Although it was now well on toward dark, and the sun was down an hour or so, I could see the robbers’ road before me, in a trough of the winding hills, where the brook plowed down from the higher barrows, and the coving banks were roofed with furze.  At present there was no one passing, neither post nor sentinel, so far as I could descry; but I thought it safer to wait a little, as twilight melted into night; and then I crept down a seam of the highland, and stood upon the Doone track.

As the road approached the entrance, it became more straight and strong, like a channel cut from rock, with the water brawling darkly along the naked side of it.  Not a tree or bush was left, to shelter a man from bullets; all was stern, and stiff, and rugged, as I could not help perceiving, even through the darkness:  and a smell as of churchyard mold, a sense of being boxed in and cooped, made me long to be out again.

And here I was, or seemed to be, particularly unlucky; for as I drew near the very entrance, lightly of foot, and warily, the moon (which had often been my friend) like an enemy broke upon me, topping the eastward ridge of rock, and filling all the open spaces with the play of wavering light.  I shrank back into the shadowy quarter on the right side of the road, and gloomily employed myself to watch the triple entrance, on which the moonlight fell askew.

All across and before the three rude and beetling archways hung a felled oak overhead, black and thick and threatening.  This, as I heard before, could be let fall in a moment, so as to crush a score of men, and bar the approach of horses.  Behind this tree the rocky mouth was spanned, as by a gallery, with brushwood and piled timber, all upon a ledge or stone, where thirty men might lurk unseen, and fire at any invader.  From that rampart it would be impossible to dislodge them, because the rock fell sheer below them twenty feet, or it may be more; while overhead it towered three hundred, and so jutted over that nothing could be cast upon them, even if a man could climb the height.  And the access to this portcullis place—­if I may so call it, being no portcullis there—­was through certain rocky chambers known to the tenants only.

But the cleverest of their devices, and the most puzzling to an enemy, was that, instead of one mouth only, there were three to choose from, with nothing to betoken which was the proper access, all being pretty much alike, and all unfenced and yawning.  And the common rumor was that in times of any danger, when any force was known to be on muster in their neighborhood, they changed their entrance every day, and diverted the other two, by means of sliding-doors, to the chasm and dark abysses.