Читать книгу A Furnace of Earth онлайн

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To her left were tumbled monotonous, low dunes, and beyond them the torn clayey bank, gashed by storms; to her right, only barren stretch of sea and sweep of sky.

At a bight of the shore, under the long, curved hole of a pine, leaning to its fall from the high bank through which half its naked roots struck sprangling, ran a zigzag footpath to a little grove, where hemlock and stunted oak grew thickly. Up she climbed, poising lightly, and drawing herself to the last step by grasping a sprawling creeper. The green coolness refreshed her, and there was more movement in the higher air.

She followed the twists of the path among the low bushes clustering in front of a sparse clearing. Facing her, in the edge of the shade, where the light fell in mottled shadows upon a soft, springy floor of dead pine needles, with its wide arms laced in the rasping boughs of the scrub-oaks around it, stood an unwieldy wooden cross, hewed roughly, its base socketed in stone and its horizontal bar held in place by a rust-red bolt. A cracked and crazy bench, also hewn, was set beneath, and just above this was nailed a heavy board in which was deeply cut this half-effaced inscription: