Ross, but this I am not skilled enough to settle. The house was a good

one for that country, two storeys high. It looked westward over a bay,

with a pier hard by for a boat, and from the door you could watch the

vapours blowing on Ben Kyaw.

On all this part of the coast, and especially near Aros, these great

granite rocks that I have spoken of go down together in troops into the

sea, like cattle on a summer's day. There they stand, for all the world

like their neighbours ashore; only the salt water sobbing between them

instead of the quiet earth, and clots of sea-pink blooming on their sides

instead of heather; and the great sea conger to wreathe about the base of

them instead of the poisonous viper of the land. On calm days you can go

wandering between them in a boat for hours, echoes following you about

the labyrinth; but when the sea is up, Heaven help the man that hears

that cauldron boiling.

Off the south-west end of Aros these blocks are very many, and much

greater in size. Indeed, they must grow monstrously bigger out to sea,

for there must be ten sea miles of open water sown with them as thick as

a country place with houses, some standing thirty feet above the tides,

some covered, but all perilous to ships; so that on a clear, westerly

blowing day, I have counted, from the top of Aros, the great rollers

breaking white and heavy over as many as six-and-forty buried reefs. But

it is nearer in shore that the danger is worst; for the tide, here

running like a mill race, makes a long belt of broken water--a _Roost_ we

call it--at the tail of the land. I have often been out there in a dead

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