 | SKETCH THIRD. The piazza tales |  |
3. SKETCH THIRD.
“For they this hight the Rock of vile Reproach,
A dangerous and dreadful place,
To which nor fish nor fowl did once approach,
But yelling meaws with sea-gulls hoars and bace
And cormoyrants with birds of ravenous race,
Which still sit waiting on that dreadful clift.”
“With that the rolling sea resounding soft
In his big base them fitly answered,
And on the Rock, the waves breaking aloft,
A solemn meane unto them measured.”
“Then he the boteman bad row easily,
And let him heare some part of that rare melody.”
“Suddeinly an innumerable flight
Of harmefull fowles about them fluttering cride,
And with their wicked wings them oft did smight
And sore annoyed, groping in that griesly night.”
“Even all the nation of unfortunate
And fatal birds about them flocked were.”
To go up into a high stone tower is not only
a very fine thing in itself, but the very best
mode of gaining a comprehensive view of the
region round about. It is all the better if this
tower stand solitary and alone, like that mysterious
of some perished castle.
Now, with reference to the Enchanted Isles,
we are fortunately supplied with just such a
noble point of observation in a remarkable
rock, from its peculiar figure called of old by
the Spaniards, Rock Rodondo, or Round Rock.
Some two hundred and fifty feet high, rising
straight from the sea ten miles from land, with
the whole mountainous group to the south and
east, Rock Rotondo occupies, on a large scale,
very much the position which the famous Campanile
or detached Bell Tower of St. Mark does
with respect to the tangled group of hoary
edifices around it.
Ere ascending, however, to gaze abroad upon
the Encantadas, this sea-tower itself claims
attention. It is visible at the distance of
thirty miles; and, fully participating in that
enchantment which pervades the group, when
first seen afar invariably is mistaken for a sail.
Four leagues away, of a golden, hazy noon, it
seems some Spanish Admiral's ship, stacked up
with glittering canvas. Sail ho! Sail ho! Sail
ho! from all three masts. But coming nigh,
into a craggy keep.
My first visit to the spot was made in the
gray of the morning. With a view of fishing,
we had lowered three boats, and pulling some
two miles from our vessel, found ourselves just
before dawn of day close under the moonshadow
of Rodondo. Its aspect was heightened,
and yet softened, by the strange double twilight
of the hour. The great full moon burnt
in the low west like a half-spent beacon, casting
a soft mellow tinge upon the sea like that
cast by a waning fire of embers upon a midnight
hearth; while along the entire east the
invisible sun sent pallid intimations of his coming.
The wind was light; the waves languid;
the stars twinkled with a faint effulgence; all
nature seemed supine with the long night
watch, and half-suspended in jaded expectation
of the sun. This was the critical hour to catch
Rodondo in his perfect mood. The twilight was
just enough to reveal every striking point,
without tearing away the dim investiture of
wonder.
From a broken stair-like base, washed, as
tower rose in entablatures of strata to a shaven
summit. These uniform layers, which compose
the mass, form its most peculiar feature. For
at their lines of junction they project flatly
into encircling shelves, from top to bottom,
rising one above another in graduated series.
And as the eaves of any old barn or abbey are
alive with swallows, so were all these rocky
ledges with unnumbered sea-fowl. Eaves upon
eaves, and nests upon nests. Here and there
were long birdlime streaks of a ghostly white
staining the tower from sea to air, readily accounting
for its sail-like look afar. All would
have been bewitchingly quiescent, were it not
for the demoniac din created by the birds. Not
only were the eaves rustling with them, but
they flew densely overhead, spreading themselves
into a winged and continually shifting
canopy. The tower is the resort of aquatic
birds for hundreds of leagues around. To the
north, to the east, to the west, stretches nothing
but eternal ocean; so that the man-of-war
hawk coming from the coasts of North
America, Polynesia, or Peru, makes his first
terra-firma, no land-bird ever lighted on it.
Fancy a red-robin or a canary there! What
a falling into the hands of the Philistines, when
the poor warbler should be surrounded by such
locust-flights of strong bandit birds, with long
bills cruel as daggers.
I know not where one can better study the
Natural History of strange sea-fowl than at
Rodondo. It is the aviary of Ocean. Birds
light here which never touched mast or tree;
hermit-birds, which ever fly alone; cloud-birds,
familiar with unpierced zones of air.
Let us first glance low down to the lower-most
shelf of all, which is the widest, too, and
but a little space from high-water mark. What
outlandish beings are these? Erect as men, but
hardly as symmetrical, they stand all round the
rock like sculptured caryatides, supporting the
next range of eaves above. Their bodies are
grotesquely misshapen; their bills short; their
feet seemingly legless; while the members at
their sides are neither fin, wing, nor arm. And
truly neither fish, flesh, nor fowl is the penguin;
as an edible, pertaining neither to Carnival
ambiguous and least lovely creature yet discovered
by man. Though dabbling in all three
elements, and indeed possessing some rudimental
claims to all, the penguin is at home
in none. On land it stumps; afloat it sculls;
in the air it flops. As if ashamed of her failure,
Nature keeps this ungainly child hidden away
at the ends of the earth, in the Straits of Magellan,
and on the abased sea-story of Rodondo.
But look, what are yon wobegone regiments
drawn up on the next shelf above? what
rank and file of large strange fowl? what sea
Friars of Orders Gray? Pelicans. Their elongated
bills, and heavy leathern pouches suspended
thereto, give them the most lugubrious
expression. A pensive race, they stand for
hours together without motion. Their dull,
ashy plumage imparts an aspect as if they had
been powdered over with cinders. A penitential
bird, indeed, fitly haunting the shores of
the clinkered Encantadas, whereon tormented
Job himself might have well sat down and
scraped himself with potsherds.
Higher up now we mark the gony, or gray
unpoetic bird, unlike its storied kinsman, which
is the snow-white ghost of the haunted Capes
of Hope and Horn.
As we still ascend from shelf to shelf, we
find the tenants of the tower serially disposed
in order of their magnitude:—gannets, black
and speckled haglets, jays, sea-hens, sperm-whale-birds,
gulls of all varieties:—thrones,
princedoms, powers, dominating one above
another in senatorial array; while, sprinkled
over all, like an ever-repeated fly in a great
piece of broidery, the stormy petrel or Mother
Cary's chicken sounds his continual challenge
and alarm. That this mysterious hummingbird
of ocean—which, had it but brilliancy of
hue, might, from its evanescent liveliness, be
almost called its butterfly, yet whose chirrup
under the stern is ominous to mariners as to
the peasant the death-tick sounding from behind
the chimney jamb—should have its special
haunt at the Encantadas, contributes, in the
seaman's mind, not a little to their dreary spell.
As day advances the dissonant din augments.
With ear-splitting cries the wild birds celebrate
the tower, and join the aerial choir hovering
overhead, while their places below are supplied
by darting myriads. But down through all
this discord of commotion, I hear clear, silver,
bugle-like notes unbrokenly falling, like oblique
lines of swift-slanting rain in a cascading
shower. I gaze far up, and behold a snow-white
angelic thing, with one long, lance-like
feather thrust out behind. It is the bright,
inspiriting chanticleer of ocean, the beauteous
bird, from its bestirring whistle of musical
invocation, fitly styled the “Boatswain's
Mate.”
The winged, life-clouding Rodondo had its
full counterpart in the finny hosts which peopled
the waters at its base. Below the water-line,
the rock seemed one honey-comb of
grottoes, affording labyrinthine lurking-places
for swarms of fairy fish. All were strange;
many exceedingly beautiful; and would have
well graced the costliest glass globes in which
gold-fish are kept for a show. Nothing was
more striking than the complete novelty of
many individuals of this multitude. Here hues
are unengraved.
To show the multitude, avidity, and nameless
fearlessness and tameness of these fish, let
me say, that often, marking through clear
spaces of water—temporarily made so by the
concentric dartings of the fish above the surface
—certain larger and less unwary wights, which
swam slow and deep; our anglers would cautiously
essay to drop their lines down to these
last. But in vain; there was no passing the
uppermost zone. No sooner did the hook touch
the sea, than a hundred infatuates contended
for the honor of capture. Poor fish of Rodondo!
in your victimized confidence, you are of
the number of those who inconsiderately trust,
while they do not understand, human nature.
But the dawn is now fairly day. Band after
band, the sea-fowl sail away to forage the
deep for their food. The tower is left solitary,
save the fish-caves at its base. Its birdlime
gleams in the golden rays like the whitewash
of a tall light-house, or the lofty sails of a
cruiser. This moment, doubtless, while we
know it to be a dead desert rock, other voyagers
ship.
But ropes now, and let us ascend. Yet soft,
this is not so easy.
| SKETCH THIRD. The piazza tales | |