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resembles in no particular the Chesil of the past, so much has it been
disturbed by man and by those furious winds which gnaw the very stones.
At present this tongue of land bears a railway, terminating in a pretty
square of houses, called Chesilton, and there is a Portland station.
Railway carriages roll where seals used to crawl.
The Isthmus of Portland two hundred years ago was a back of sand, with a
vertebral spine of rock.
The child's danger changed its form. What he had had to fear in the
descent was falling to the bottom of the precipice; in the isthmus, it
was falling into the holes. After dealing with the precipice, he must
deal with the pitfalls. Everything on the sea-shore is a trap--the rock
is slippery, the strand is quicksand. Resting-places are but snares. It
is walking on ice which may suddenly crack and yawn with a fissure,
through which you disappear. The ocean has false stages below, like a
well-arranged theatre.
The long backbone of granite, from which fall away both slopes of the
isthmus, is awkward of access. It is difficult to find there what, in
scene-shifters' language, are termed practicables. Man has no
hospitality to hope for from the ocean; from the rock no more than from
the wave. The sea is provident for the bird and the fish alone.
Isthmuses are especially naked and rugged; the wave, which wears and
mines them on either side, reduces them to the simplest form. Everywhere
there were sharp relief ridges, cuttings, frightful fragments of torn
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