As you draw in to the coast across the blue-ribbed sea, which, for three parts of the year, is all alive with dancing sunflakes, the smooth bold ridge resolves itself into deep rents and chasms.  The great granite cliffs stand out like the frowning heads of giants, seamed and furrowed with ages of conflict.  The rocks are wrought into a thousand fantastic shapes.  The whole coast is honeycombed with caves and bays, with chapelles and arches and flying buttresses, among which are wonders such as you will find nowhere else in the world.  And the rocks are coloured most wondrously by that which is in them and upon them, and perhaps the last are the most beautiful, for their lichen robes are woven of silver, and gold, and gray, and green, and orange.  When the evening sun shines full upon the Autelets, and sets them all aflame with golden fire, they become veritable altars and lift one’s soul to worship.  He would be a bold man who would say he knew a nobler sight, and I should doubt his word at that, until I had seen it with my own eyes.

The great seamed rocks of the headlands are black, and white, and red, and pink, and purple, and yellow; while up above, the short green herbage is soft and smooth as velvet, and the waving bracken is like a dark green robe of coarser stuff lined delicately with russet gold.

Now I have told you all this because I have met people whose only idea of Sercq was of a storm-beaten rock, standing grim and stark among the thousand other rocks that bite up through the sea thereabouts.  Whereas, in reality, our Island is a little paradise, gay with flowers all the year round.  For the gorse at all events is always aflame, even in the winter—­and then in truth most of all, both inside the houses and out; for, inside, the dried bushes flame merrily in the wide hearthplaces, while, outside, the prickly points still gleam like gold against the wintry gray.  And the land is fruitful too in trees and shrubs, though, in the more exposed places, it is true, the trees suffer somewhat from the lichen, which blows in from the sea, and clings to their windward sides, and slowly eats their lives away.

And now to tell you of that which happened when I was three years old, and I will make it all as clear as I can, from all that I have been able to pick up, and from my knowledge of the places which are still very much as they were then.

The front door of our Island is the tunnel in the rock cut by old Helier de Carteret nearly three hundred years ago.  Standing in the tunnel, you see on one side the shingle of the beach where the boats lie but poorly sheltered from the winter storms, though we are hoping before long to have a breakwater capable of affording better shelter than the present one.  You see also the row of great capstans at the foot of the cliff by which the boats are hauled as far out of reach of the waves as possible, though sometimes not far enough.  Through the other end of the tunnel you look into the Creux Road, which leads straight up to the life and centre of the Island.