Glaucus; Or, The Wonders of the Shore

And when you learn that this convulsion probably took plus at the bottom of an ocean hundreds of thousands of years ago, you have at least a few thoughts over which to ruminate, which will make you at once too busy to grumble, and ashamed to grumble. Yet, after all, I hardly think the lake was formed in this way, and suspect that it may have been dry for ages after it emerged from the primeval waves, and Snowdonia was a palm-fringed island in a tropic sea. Let us look the place over more fully. You see the lake is nearly circular; on the side where we stand the pebbly beach is not six feet above the water, and slopes away steeply into the valley behind us, while before us it shelves gradually into the lake; forty yards out, as you know, there is not ten feet water; and then a steep bank, the edge whereof we and the big trout know well, sinks suddenly to unknown depths. On the opposite side, that flat-topped wall of rock towers up shoreless into the sky, seven hundred feet perpendicular; the deepest water of all we know is at its very foot. Right and left, two shoulders of down slope into the lake. Now turn round and look down the gorge. Remark that this pebble bank on which we stand reaches some fifty yards downward: you see the loose stones peeping out everywhere. We may fairly suppose that we stand on a dam of loose stones, a hundred feet deep.