Now that I was calmer, the sound became as fascinating as it was fearful, and I felt a contradictory desire to seek out its source despite my still powerful shrinking.
Opening a portiere at the side of the room nearest the pounding, I beheld a small and richly draped corridor ending in a carved door and large oriel window.
To this window I was irresistibly drawn, though my ill-defined apprehensions seemed almost equally bent on holding me back.
As I approached it I could see a chaotic whirl of waters in the distance. Then, as I attained it and glanced out on all sides, the stupendous picture of my surroundings burst upon me with full and devastating force.

I beheld such a sight as I had never beheld before, and which no living person can have seen save in the delirium of fever or the inferno of opium.
The building stood on a narrow point of land-or what was now a narrow point of land-fully 300 feet above what must lately have been a seething vortex of mad waters.
On either side of the house there fell a newly washed-out precipice of red earth, whilst ahead of me the hideous waves were still rolling in frightfully, eating away the land with ghastly monotony and deliberation.
Out a mile or more there rose and fell menacing breakers at least fifty feet in height, and on the far horizon ghoulish black clouds of grotesque contour were resting and brooding like unwholesome vultures.
The waves were dark and purplish, almost black, and clutched at the yielding red mud of the bank as if with uncouth, greedy hands.
I could not but feel that some noxious marine mind had declared a war of extermination upon all the solid ground, perhaps abetted by the angry sky.

Recovering at length from the stupor into which this unnatural spectacle had thrown me, I realized that my actual physical danger was acute.
Even whilst I gazed the bank had lost many feet, and it could not be long before the house would fall undermined into the awful pit of lashing waves.
Accordingly I hastened to the opposite side of the edifice, and finding a door, emerged at once, locking it after me with a curious key which had hung inside.
I now beheld more of the strange region about me, and marked a singular division which seemed to exist in the hostile ocean [and firmament]...