A pile of drift-wood blazing in a cleft of the rock, through which its smoke ascended, filled the cavern with warmth; and a red glow, that lit up the rugged surface of its rocky walls and arched roof, displaying the wild lichens that spotted them, and the green tufts of weed that grew in the crannies.
A myriad of metallic particles, green schorl, blue quartz, rock crystal, and basaltic prisms, glittered in the blaze of the hermit's fire. It revealed also the strange and ghastly fissures of the cavern, which had been formed by some vast subterranean throe of nature, that had rent asunder the solid mountains; and, by hurling one gigantic mass of rock against another, formed this deep retreat, into which Hob of Ormiston penetrated with a resolute aspect but a hesitating heart.
The roar of a subterranean cataract, that poured down white and foaming behind one of these ghastly seams, lent additional effect to the aspect of the cavern--at the upper end of which stood an altar of stone, having on it a skull polished like ivory by long use, a rude crucifix, and the words--
painted above it on the wall in large and uncouth characters. At the approach of Ormiston, the hermit arose from his lair or bed of dried seaweed, and a more wild and unearthly object had never greeted the eyes of his visitor.
His years might number sixty; he was perfectly bald, and his scalp shone like that of the skull, to which his visage, hollow-eyed and attenuated to the last degree, would have borne no distant resemblance but for the long white beard of thin and silvery hair that flowed to his waist. He was clad in the skin of the sea-dog, and his bare legs and arms were so lean that they resembled the bones of a skeleton, with veins and fibres twisted over them. As the hermit arose, Ormiston paused; and while he gazed with irresolution, the wild man did so with wonder; for the Scottish knight was richly accoutred in a suit of plate armour; his hose were of scarlet cloth twined with gold, and the band of his blue velvet bonnet, like the hilt of his dagger, sparkled with precious stones.
"Heaven save you, father!" said he, uncovering his head, and speaking in that broken Norwegian dialect which he had acquired among the Shetlanders.
