Detricand bowed, accepted, and took a pinch. “I must be going,” he said.
At eight o’clock the next morning, Guida and her fellow-voyagers, bound for the Ecrehos Rocks, had caught the first ebb of the tide, and with a fair wind from the sou’-west had skirted the coast, ridden lightly over the Banc des Violets, and shaped their course nor’-east. Guida kept the helm all the way, as she had been promised by Ranulph. It was still more than half tide when they approached the rocks, and with a fair wind there should be ease in landing.
No more desolate spot might be imagined. To the left, as you faced towards Jersey, was a long sand-bank. Between the rocks and the sand-bank shot up a tall, lonely shaft of granite with an evil history. It had been chosen as the last refuge of safety for the women and children of a shipwrecked vessel, in the belief that high tide would not reach them. But the wave rose up maliciously, foot by foot, till it drowned their cries for ever in the storm. The sand-bank was called “Ecriviere,” and the rock was afterwards known as the “Pierre des Femmes.”
Other rocks less prominent, but no less treacherous, flanked it--the Noir Sabloniere and the Grande Galere. To the right of the main island were a group of others, all reef and shingle, intersected by treacherous channels; in calm lapped by water with the colours of a prism of crystal, in storm by a leaden surf and flying foam. These were known as the Colombiere, the Grosse Tete, Tas de Pois, and the Marmotiers; each with its retinue of sunken reefs and needles of granitic gneiss lying low in menace. Happy the sailor caught in a storm and making for the shelter the little curves in the island afford, who escapes a twist of the current, a sweep of the tide, and the impaling fingers of the submarine palisades.
Beyond these rocks lay Maitre Ile, all gneiss and shingle, a desert in the sea. The holy men of the early Church, beholding it from the shore of Normandy, had marked it for a refuge from the storms of war and the follies of the world. So it came to pass, for the honour of God and the Virgin Mary, the Abbe of Val Richer builded a priory there: and there now lie in peace the bones of the monks of Val Richer beside the skeletons of unfortunate gentlemen of the sea of later centuries--pirates from France, buccaneers from England, and smugglers from Jersey, who kept their trysts in the precincts of the ancient chapel.