above the tides, some covered, but all perilous to ships; so that
on a clear, westerly blowing day, I have counted, from the top of
Aros, the great rollers breaking white and heavy over as many as
six-and-forty buried reefs. But it is nearer in shore that the
danger is worst; for the tide, here running like a mill race, makes
a long belt of broken water - a ROOST we call it - at the tail of
the land. I have often been out there in a dead calm at the slack
of the tide; and a strange place it is, with the sea swirling and
combing up and boiling like the cauldrons of a linn, and now and
again a little dancing mutter of sound as though the ROOST were
talking to itself. But when the tide begins to run again, and
above all in heavy weather, there is no man could take a boat
within half a mile of it, nor a ship afloat that could either steer
or live in such a place. You can hear the roaring of it six miles
away. At the seaward end there comes the strongest of the bubble;
and it's here that these big breakers dance together - the dance of
death, it may be called - that have got the name, in these parts,
of the Merry Men. I have heard it said that they run fifty feet
high; but that must be the green water only, for the spray runs
twice as high as that. Whether they got the name from their
movements, which are swift and antic, or from the shouting they
make about the turn of the tide, so that all Aros shakes with it,
is more than I can tell.

The truth is, that in a south-westerly wind, that part of our
archipelago is no better than a trap. If a ship got through the
reefs, and weathered the Merry Men, it would be to come ashore on
the south coast of Aros, in Sandag Bay, where so many dismal things
befell our family, as I propose to tell. The thought of all these
dangers, in the place I knew so long, makes me particularly welcome