Michael is ever before us, gleaming in the sunshine or
looming through the storm. In our little sketch we have given as
accurately as possible its appearance from Avranches on a summer's day
after rain;[29] but it should be seen when a storm passes over it, when
the same clouds that we have watched so often on summer nights, casting
deep shadows on the intervening plain--some silver-lined that may have
expressed hope, some black as midnight that might mean despair--come
over to us like messengers from the great rock, and take our little
promontory by storm. They come silently one by one, and gather round and
fold over us; then suddenly clap their hands and burst with such a
deluge of rain that it seems a matter for wonder that any little
creeping human things could survive the flood. And it does us good; we
are thoroughly drenched, our houses and gardens do not recover their
fair presence for weeks; our little prejudices and foibles are well
nigh washed out of us, and we are reminded of the dread reality of the
lives of our neighbours on the island, who form a much larger colony
than ourselves.[30]
'On no account omit a visit to Mont St. Michael,' say the guide-books,
and accordingly we charter a carriage on a summer's morning and are
driven in a few hours along a bad road, to the edge of the sands about a
mile from the mount--the same sands that we saw depicted in the Bayeux
tapestry, when William and Harold marched on Dinan.
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