To Perish in Penzance by Jeanne M. Dams

whole area, Porthgwarra or so right ’round to The Lizard.”
    â€œOh.”
    â€œNever mind. I’ll show you a map later. Just look.”
    I stepped out into the wind, moved close to the edge of the cliff, and gasped.
    The sea was far below me, but its noise was loud, even up here. Waves rolled in and broke on the rocks in ceaseless tumult. The rocks were sharp and cruel, tossed down as though to lay a trap for an unwary sailor. Landing a sailing craft there would be the act of a madman in broad daylight, let alone on a moonless night.
    â€œAlan, how did any of them survive? It looks impossible.”
    â€œWe’ll drive a little farther, to Bessie’s Cove where we can park, and I’ll show you.”
    Bessie’s Cove turned out to be a rough half-moon carved out of the cliff by centuries of wind and water. At the top of the cliff was a lovely green meadow that afforded a tiny parking place. A farmhouse or two stood far back from the cliff, and near its edge there was a small, deserted stone building that might at one time have been a shepherd’s hut.
    Down below there was a broad, fairly flat, rocky shelf sloping up gradually from the water’s edge. After fifty feet or so, though, the shelf met the body of the cliff and rose almost straight up in a series of uneven ridges.
    The rocks were nearly black and must have been very hard, for they didn’t seem to be very much weathered. They had broken off here and there and left boulders at the edge of the sea. Basalt, perhaps, I thought, for the edges looked sharp.
    â€œWell, it’s bigger than Piskie’s Cove, but it looks just as dangerous to me.”
    â€œLet’s go down,” said Alan. “There’s a path that’s not too bad, but I’ll go first. Give you something soft to land on.”
    â€œI hope it won’t come to that,” I said, gritting my teeth and grasping my walking stick so tightly my knuckles were white. With my unreliable knees, going down is always much worse than going up. Ah, well, if I had to do any slithering, at least my jeans were tough.
    Alan paused about halfway down to give me a chance to catch my breath. When I had, I pointed. “Alan, what are those grooves in the rock? On the flat part, see? They look for all the world as though railroad tracks had been there and been taken up at some point.”
    â€œYou’ve got the track part right. Those were made at least two hundred years ago by the wheels of the smugglers’ carts. They didn’t sail their cutters right up to the rocks, of course. You were right about that; it would have been impossible. They anchored as close in as they dared and then took the cargo off in small boats, or, in the case of rum, floated the casks right in to shore. Once they got the cargo to the rocks, they loaded it into carts and trundled it to the caves, where they’d store it until it could be taken up the cliff.”
    â€œGood heavens.” I sat on a convenient rock and looked, and listened. The hypnotic clamor of the waves, the cry of the gulls, the smell of salt water and seaweed. A sky so blue it looked like a touched-up photograph, bright sunshine warming the rocks. Such a peaceful scene, but this place had been the site of dangerous, desperate activity, night after moonless night, for enough years to wear permanent tracks in the rock, tracks that another two centuries of high tides had not yet worn away.
    â€œAre you game to go on down to the caves? The tide’s coming in, but I should think we’ve a bit of time before the footing gets sloshy.”
    â€œSure. I came to see everything, and I’d better do it now, because I guarantee you’ll never get me down this path again. I may not be able to go inside the cave, though, or not very far. It depends on how big it is. I managed Fingal’s Cave all right, but little ones …”
    He nodded. He knew about my unfortunate quirk. I’d had to