CHAPTER XVIII

WAVERLEY PROCEEDS ON HIS JOURNEY

When Edward had collected his scattered recollection, he was surprised to observe the cavern totally deserted.  Having arisen and put his dress in some order, he looked more accurately round him; but all was still solitary.  If it had not been for the decayed brands of the fire, now sunk into grey ashes, and the remnants of the festival, consisting of bones half burnt and half gnawed, and an empty keg or two, there remained no traces of Donald and his band.  When Waverley sallied forth to the entrance of the cave, he perceived that the point of rock, on which remained the marks of last night’s beacon, was accessible by a small path, either natural or roughly hewn in the rock, along the little inlet of water which ran a few yards up into the cavern, where, as in a wetdock, the skiff which brought him there the night before was still lying moored.  When he reached the small projecting platform on which the beacon had been established, he would have believed his further progress by land impossible, only that it was scarce probable but what the inhabitants of the cavern had some mode of issuing from it otherwise than by the lake.  Accordingly, he soon observed three or four shelving steps, or ledges of rock, at the very extremity of the little platform; and, making use of them as a staircase, he clambered by their means around the projecting shoulder of the crag on which the cavern opened, and, descending with some difficulty on the other side, he gained the wild and precipitous shores of a Highland loch, about four miles in length and a mile and a half across, surrounded by heathy and savage mountains, on the crests of which the morning mist was still sleeping.

Looking back to the place from which he came, he could not help admiring the address which had adopted a retreat of such seclusion and secrecy.  The rock, round the shoulder of which he had turned by a few imperceptible notches, that barely afforded place for the foot, seemed, in looking back upon it, a huge precipice, which barred all further passage by the shores of the lake in that direction.  There could be no possibility, the breadth of the lake considered, of descrying the entrance of the narrow and low-browed cave from the other side; so that, unless the retreat had been sought for with boats, or disclosed by treachery, it might be a safe and secret residence to its garrison as long as they were supplied with provisions.  Having satisfied his curiosity in these particulars, Waverley looked around for Evan Dhu and his attendants, who, he rightly judged, would be at no great distance, whatever might have become of Donald Bean Lean and his party, whose mode of life was, of course, liable to sudden migrations of abode.  Accordingly, at the distance of about half a mile, he beheld a Highlander (Evan apparently) angling in the lake, with another attending him, whom, from the weapon which he shouldered, he recognised for his friend with the battle-axe.