But he looked quietly down into the boiling pot below, and said, “We have still an hour to wait.  The tide is higher than I thought.”  So we sat on the short salt turf and waited.

“Tiens!” said Carette, pointing suddenly.  And looking, we saw three boats pull out from the channel between Herm and Jethou.  One came past us towards the north-east, and Uncle George made us lie flat behind gorse cushions till it was out of sight round Bec du Nez, though by crawling a little way up the head we could see it lying watchfully about a mile away.  Another went off round Little Sercq to stop any communication with Jersey.  The third lay in the way between Sercq and Peter Port.

“M.  Torode shuts the doors,” said my grandfather tersely.  “B’en! we will try in the dark.”

Between the softness of the turf and the heat of the sun and my great weariness, I was just on the point of falling asleep, when Uncle George came back from a look at his cleft, and picked up his loads, and said, “Come!” and five minutes later we were standing behind him in the salt coolness of the little black chasm, among the slabs and boulders and the fresh sea pools.  And still we saw no entrance.

But he went to the inner side of a great slab that lay wedged against the wall of the chasm, and, stooping there, dragged out rock after rock, cunningly piled so that the waves could not displace them, until a small opening was disclosed behind the leaning slab.  It was no more than three feet high, and we had to creep in on our hands and knees, which my grandfather, from his size and stiffness, found no easy matter.

The tunnel led straight in for a space of twenty feet or so, and then struck upwards, with a very rough floor which made no easy crawling ground, and a roof set with ragged rocks for unwary heads.  The little light that came in round the corner of the slab in the dark chasm very soon left us, and we crawled on in the dark, hoping, one of us at all events, that the road was not a long one.  And suddenly we breathed more freely and found a welcome space above our heads.

Uncle George struck flint and steel and lit a candle, and we found ourselves in a long narrow chamber, which looked just a fault in the rocks, or the space out of which the softer stuff had sunk away.  The roof we could not see, but from the slope of the walls on either side I thought they probably met at a point a great way up, and the narrow crack of a cave ran far beyond our sight.

“My Boutiques,” said Uncle George, “and no man—­no living man but myself has ever been here till now, so far as I know.”  And round the walls we saw a very large number of neatly piled kegs and packages, at which my grandfather said, “Ah ha, mon beau!” and Uncle George smiled cheerfully in the candle-light.

“The Great Boutiques lie over there,” he said, pointing.  “There are communications, high up along the cross shelves.  But they need not trouble you.  I am quite certain no man but myself knows them.  So if you hear the waves tumbling about in the big cave you don’t need to be frightened.”