University of Virginia Library

5. CHAPTER V.

It will not be difficult with many persons, to comprehend
how a condition of utter solitude should not
necessarily produce a sense of pain. To the man of
great mental resources, and of a habit contemplative
and thoughtful, such a condition would be apt rather
to suggest ideas of complete security and repose,
which would be friendly to the enjoyment of a favorite
indulgence. To spirits whom the world has soured—
whom the greedy strifes of men have offended—men
of nice sensibilities and jealous affections, whose friendships
have proved false and wounded—as so many

deceitful reeds which have broken and pierced their
sides; to the heart of deep and earnest passions,
robbed of those upon whom all the heart's affections
have been set; these, all, might rejoice in an abode
from which the trying services, and vexing necessities,
and disquieting obtrusions, of social life, were shut
out and excluded forever. But Lopez de Levya was
not one of these! He was young, and handsome, and
hopeful, and this was his first trouble. The world
still loomed out before his vision, the gay and songful
paradise which youthful fancies describe it still. There
were warm passions and eager sympathies in his soul
still to be gratified; and though we may not regard
him as a person to whom affections of any kind were
very necessary, yet had he a bosom filled with those
which grow from an intense appetite for praise—which
could have their gratification only in a world of beings
like himself. It would be impossible to describe the
utter desolation which possessed the bosom of the unhappy
wretch when he did finally awaken to realize
the fact that he was left alone—utterly abandoned by
his comrades—upon an obscure islet of the Caribbean
Sea! It was a long time, indeed, before he could
utterly conceive his own situation—a long time before
he could persuade himself that the stubborn and unrelenting
spirit of Velasquez had absolutely resolved
that such should be his doom. For hours—until the
midnight came with its sad and drooping stars, looking
down mournfully upon the billows of the ever-chiding
ocean—until the daylight dawned, and the red sun,
rushing up from the eastern waters, rose angry and
fiery, and blazing down upon the little islet with the
fiery glance of a destroying despot;—for the first dreary
interval, from sun to sun—he still cherished the hope
that this was but a trial of his strength—a cruel experiment
upon his youth and courage;—and, recovering
from the first feelings of consternation, when, at
sunset, the dusky white sails of the vessel finally disappeared
from sight, the unhappy wretch still flattered
himself that, with the morning, he should hail her
outline once more upon his horizon, and catch the
glitter of her foaming prow coming to his rescue. And
with this hope he clung to the beach all night. He
slept not—how could he sleep? Even for one night,
how intense was the desolation of that scene. There
was the eternal sighing and moaning of the sea, which,
toward the morning, subsided into calm and slept on,
as if still dreaming of future tempests. And there
were voices all around him of strange animals and
wild-fowl—sometimes a chirp, as of an insect, and
sometimes the scream of some passionate bird;—and,
anon, a great plunge in the waters, as if of some
mighty beast leaving its place of sleep upon the land.
It was among the misfortunes of Lopez de Levya that
he was no hero, and all these sounds inspired him with
terror. Not less terrible to him were those wild, deep
mysterious eyes of the stars, slowly passing over him,
and looking down, as if to see whether he slept, in
their passage to the deep. Never was night and situation
so full of charm, yet so full of the awful and the
terrible. Beautiful, indeed, surpassingly beautiful and
sweet, was the strange wild charm of that highly
spiritual mingling of land and ocean;—that small and
lovely islet, just rising above the deep, so thoroughly
environed by its rocking billows, shone upon by that
wilderness of stars; breathed over by that pure zephyr,
gilding it with perfume and blessing from the South;
and haunted by unknown sounds, from strange creatures
of the sea and sky, who, in a life of perpetual
freedom, could never know the feeling of desolation
or of exile.

But the wild romance and the wondrous beauty of
the scene were lost upon the man who had no higher
idea of the possession of the intellectual nature than
such as could be drawn from association with his fellow.
The region, unoccupied by man, however beautiful in
itself, could bring no joy, no peace to the bosom of the
exile. Velasquez knew the real nature of his victim.
He well knew that Lopez had no sympathy with the
mute existences of sea and sky, of earth and air; and
of those more exquisite essences, which, in such a
situation, the imaginative nature would have joyed to
conjure up from the spiritual world, he thought only
with terror and reluctance. He did fancy that voices
came to him upon the night air;—the voices of men,
and in a strange, unusual language;—and he instantly
trembled with fears of the cannibal—the anthropophagi,
who were supposed, at that period, to be the
only inhabitants of these regions.

But the night passed over in security. He opened
his eyes upon another day, in the solitude of that
wild abode, ere yet the sun had warmed with his gay
tints the gray mansions of the East. He opened his

eyes upon the sea and sky as before. The billows
were rolling slowly away at his feet, in long low
courses, but slightly lifted by the breezes of the
dawn. Vainly were his eyes stretched out over the
watery waste, in the pathway of the departed vessel.
The vast plain of ocean spread away before him unbroken
by a speck; and when the sun rushed up
visibly into the heavens, and laid bare the whole
bright circumference of the deep, for many a league,
undarkened by an object, then the conviction of his
utter loneliness—his life of future loneliness—forced
itself upon the heart of the wretched youth; and
flinging himself once more upon the earth, he thrust
his fingers into the sands, and cried aloud in the depth
of his agony—

“Jesu! it is true!—it is true!—and I am left—
left by my people—to perish here alone!”

We spare his lamentations—his entreaties—as if
there were still some human being at hand who might
afford him relief and consolation—to whom he might
appeal for succor and protection. Prayer he had
none. The name of the Deity, of the Saviour, and
the Virgin, were sometimes upon his lips; but the
utterance was habitual, as he had been accustomed to
employ them in mere idleness and indifference. Three
days passed, in which despair had full possession of
his faculties. In this time he lay crouching upon the
beach during the day, and gazing vacantly in the
direction in which the ship had gone. At night, he
retreated to higher ground, filled with apprehensions
of great monsters of the sea—of the seas themselves

—lest, rising suddenly, endued with a human or a
fiendish will, they might gather round him while he
slept, and hurry him off, beyond escape, to their
gloomy abysses. A small clump of trees afforded him
the semblance of a shelter. Here he lay, from nightfall
to dawn, only sleeping in the utter exhaustion of
nature, and suffering, at all other times, from every
sort of terror. The stars, looking down through the
palm-leaves overhead, with their mild, sad aspects,
seemed to him so many mocking and malignant angels
exulting in his condition. The moaning of the sea,
and the murmurs of the nightwind, were all so many
voices of terror appointed to deride him in his desolation,
and impress his heart with a sense of unknown
dangers. The rush of great wings occasionally along
the shore, or the rustle of smaller ones in the boughs
above him—perhaps of creatures as timid as himself
—kept him wakeful with constant apprehensions;
and, at moments of the midnight, a terrible bellowing,
as of some sea-beast rising to the shore, or leaving it
with a plunge that echoed throughout the islet—struck
a very palsy to his heart, that, for the time, seemed
to silence all its vibrations. Let us leave the miserable
outcast, thus suffering and apprehensive, while we
return to the inmates of the vessel by which he was
abandoned.