When Waverley sallied forth to the
entrance of the cave, he perceived that the point of rock, on which
remained the marks of last night's beacon, was accessible by a small
path, either natural or roughly hewn in the rock, along the little inlet
of water which ran a few yards up into the cavern, where, as in a
wetdock, the skiff which brought him there the night before was still
lying moored. When he reached the small projecting platform on which the
beacon had been established, he would have believed his further progress
by land impossible, only that it was scarce probable but what the
inhabitants of the cavern had some mode of issuing from it otherwise than
by the lake. Accordingly, he soon observed three or four shelving steps,
or ledges of rock, at the very extremity of the little platform; and,
making use of them as a staircase, he clambered by their means around the
projecting shoulder of the crag on which the cavern opened, and,
descending with some difficulty on the other side, he gained the wild and
precipitous shores of a Highland loch, about four miles in length and a
mile and a half across, surrounded by heathy and savage mountains, on the
crests of which the morning mist was still sleeping.
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