The Seven Years of Seeking 127

ropes were all dry and crumbling, and the
raiment of the men had mouldered away.

In the length of that narrow pass between
the lofty cliff-walls the Sea-farers found no
vestige of grass or weed, either on the cliff-
sides or on the stones and shingle. Neither
was there any water, save where in the hol-
lows of some of the boulders rain had lodged
and had not yet been drunk up by the sun.
No living creature, great or small, lived in
that ghyll.

Within the round of the sea-walls the
island lay flat and low, and it was one bleak
waste of boulder and shingle, lifeless and
waterless save for the rain in the pitted sur-
faces of the stones ; but in the midst of the
waste there stood, dead and leafless, a vast
gaunt tree, which at one time must have
been a goodly show. When the Sea-farers
reached it, they found lying on the dead
turf about its roots the white bones of yet
four other men.

Much they questioned and conjectured
whence these ill-starred wanderers had come
to lay their bones on so uncharitable a soil,
and whether they had perished in seek-
ing, like themselves, for the Earthly Para-