or, Enchanted Isles
by Herman Melville
(1854)
SKETCH FIRST.
THE ISLES AT LARGE.
–”That may not be, said then the ferryman, Least we unweeting hap to be fordonne; For those same islands seeming now and than, Are not firme land, nor any certein wonne, But stragling plots which to and fro do ronne In the wide waters; therefore are they hight The Wandering Islands; therefore do them shonne; For they have oft drawne many a wandring wight Into most deadly daunger and distressed plight; For whosoever once hath fastened His foot thereon may never it secure But wandreth evermore uncertein and unsure.”
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“Darke, dolefull, dreary, like a greedy grave, That still for carrion carcasses doth crave; On top whereof ay dwelt the ghastly owl, Shrieking his balefull note, which ever drave Far from that haunt all other cheerful fowl, And all about it wandring ghosts did wayle and howl.”
Take five-and-twenty heaps of cinders dumped here and there in anoutside city lot; imagine some of them magnified into mountains, andthe vacant lot the sea; and you will have a fit idea of the generalaspect of the Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles. A group rather of extinctvolcanoes than of isles; looking much as the world at large might, aftera penal conflagration.
It is to be doubted whether any spot of earth can, in desolateness,furnish a parallel to this group. Abandoned cemeteries of long ago, oldcities by piecemeal tumbling to their ruin, these are melancholy enough;but, like all else which has but once been associated with humanity,they still awaken in us some thoughts of sympathy, however sad. Hence,even the Dead Sea, along with whatever other emotions it may at timesinspire, does not fail to touch in the pilgrim some of his lessunpleasurable feelings.
And as for solitariness; the great forests of the north, the expanses ofunnavigated waters, the Greenland ice-fields, are the profoundest ofsolitudes to a human observer; still the magic of their changeable tidesand seasons mitigates their terror; because, though unvisited by men,those forests are visited by the May; the remotest seas reflect familiarstars even as Lake Erie does; and in the clear air of a fine Polar day,the irradiated, azure ice shows beautifully as malachite.
But the special curse, as one may call it, of the Encantadas, that whichexalts them in desolation above Idumea and the Pole, is, that to themchange never comes; neither the change of seasons nor of sorrows. Cut bythe Equator, they know not autumn, and they know not spring; whilealready reduced to the lees of fire, ruin itself can work little moreupon them. The showers refresh the deserts; but in these isles, rainnever falls. Like split Syrian gourds left withering in the sun, theyare cracked by an everlasting drought beneath a torrid sky. “Have mercyupon me,” the wailing spirit of the Encantadas seems to cry, “and sendLazarus that he may dip the tip of his finger in water and cool mytongue, for I am tormented in this flame.”
Another feature in these isles is their emphatic uninhabitableness. Itis deemed a fit type of all-forsaken overthrow, that the jackal shouldden in the wastes of weedy Babylon; but the Encantadas refuse to harboreven the outcasts of the beasts. Man and wolf alike disown them. Littlebut reptile life is here found: tortoises, lizards, immense spiders,snakes, and that strangest anomaly of outlandish nature, the _aguano_.No voice, no low, no howl is heard; the chief sound of life here is ahiss.
On most of the isles where vegetation is found at all, it is moreungrateful than the blankness of Aracama. Tangled thickets of wirybushes, without fruit and without a name, springing up among deepfissures of calcined rock, and treacherously masking them; or a parchedgrowth of distorted cactus trees.
In many places the coast is rock-bound, or, more properly,clinker-bound; tumbled masses of blackish or greenish stuff like thedross of an iron-furnace, forming dark clefts and caves here and there,into which a ceaseless sea pours a fury of foam; overhanging them with aswirl of gray, haggard mist, amidst which sail screaming flights ofunearthly birds heightening the dismal din. However calm the seawithout, there is no rest for these swells and those rocks; they lashand are lashed, even when the outer ocean is most at peace with, itself.On the oppressive, clouded days, such as are peculiar to this part ofthe watery Equator, the dark, vitrified masses, many of which raisethemselves among white whirlpools and breakers in detached and perilousplaces off the shore, present a most Plutonian sight. In no world but afallen one could such lands exist.
Those parts of the strand free from the marks of fire, stretch away inwide level beaches of multitudinous dead shells, with here and theredecayed bits of sugar-cane, bamboos, and cocoanuts, washed upon thisother and darker world from the charming palm isles to the westward andsouthward; all the way from Paradise to Tartarus; while mixed with therelics of distant beauty you will sometimes see fragments of charredwood and mouldering ribs of wrecks. Neither will any one be surprised atmeeting these last, after observing the conflicting currents which eddythroughout nearly all the wide channels of the entire group. Thecapriciousness of the tides of air sympathizes with those of the sea.Nowhere is the wind so light, baffling, and every way unreliable, and sogiven to perplexing calms, as at the Encantadas. Nigh a month has beenspent by a ship going from one isle to another, though but ninety milesbetween; for owing to the force of the current, the boats employed totow barely suffice to keep the craft from sweeping upon the cliffs, butdo nothing towards accelerating her voyage. Sometimes it is impossiblefor a vessel from afar to fetch up with the group itself, unless largeallowances for prospective lee-way have been made ere its coming insight. And yet, at other times, there is a mysterious indraft, whichirresistibly draws a passing vessel among the isles, though not bound tothem.
True, at one period, as to some extent at the present day, large fleetsof whalemen cruised for spermaceti upon what some seamen call theEnchanted Ground. But this, as in due place will be described, was offthe great outer isle of Albemarle, away from the intricacies of thesmaller isles, where there is plenty of sea-room; and hence, to thatvicinity, the above remarks do not altogether apply; though even therethe current runs at times with singular force, shifting, too, with assingular a caprice.
Indeed, there are seasons when currents quite unaccountable prevail fora great distance round about the total group, and are so strong andirregular as to change a vessel’s course against the helm, thoughsailing at the rate of four or five miles the hour. The difference inthe reckonings of navigators, produced by these causes, along with thelight and variable winds, long nourished a persuasion, that thereexisted two distinct clusters of isles in the parallel of theEncantadas, about a hundred leagues apart. Such was the idea of theirearlier visitors, the Buccaneers; and as late as 1750, the charts ofthat part of the Pacific accorded with the strange delusion. And thisapparent fleetingness and unreality of the locality of the isles wasmost probably one reason for the Spaniards calling them the Encantada,or Enchanted Group.
But not uninfluenced by their character, as they now confessedly exist,the modern voyager will be inclined to fancy that the bestowal of thisname might have in part originated in that air of spell-bound desertnesswhich so significantly invests the isles. Nothing can better suggest theaspect of once living things malignly crumbled from ruddiness intoashes. Apples of Sodom, after touching, seem these isles.
However wavering their place may seem by reason of the currents, theythemselves, at least to one upon the shore, appear invariably the same:fixed, cast, glued into the very body of cadaverous death.
Nor would the appellation, enchanted, seem misapplied in still anothersense. For concerning the peculiar reptile inhabitant of thesewilds–whose presence gives the group its second Spanish name,Gallipagos–concerning the tortoises found here, most mariners have longcherished a superstition, not more frightful than grotesque. Theyearnestly believe that all wicked sea-officers, more especiallycommodores and captains, are at death (and, in some cases, before death)transformed into tortoises; thenceforth dwelling upon these hotaridities, sole solitary lords of Asphaltum.
Doubtless, so quaintly dolorous a thought was originally inspired by thewoe-begone landscape itself; but more particularly, perhaps, by thetortoises. For, apart from their strictly physical features, there issomething strangely self-condemned in the appearance of these creatures.Lasting sorrow and penal hopelessness are in no animal form sosuppliantly expressed as in theirs; while the thought of their wonderfullongevity does not fail to enhance the impression.
Nor even at the risk of meriting the charge of absurdly believing inenchantments, can I restrain the admission that sometimes, even now,when leaving the crowded city to wander out July and August among theAdirondack Mountains, far from the influences of towns andproportionally nigh to the mysterious ones of nature; when at such timesI sit me down in the mossy head of some deep-wooded gorge, surrounded byprostrate trunks of blasted pines and recall, as in a dream, my otherand far-distant rovings in the baked heart of the charmed isles; andremember the sudden glimpses of dusky shells, and long languid necksprotruded from the leafless thickets; and again have beheld thevitreous inland rocks worn down and grooved into deep ruts by ages andages of the slow draggings of tortoises in quest of pools of scantywater; I can hardly resist the feeling that in my time I have indeedslept upon evilly enchanted ground.
Nay, such is the vividness of my memory, or the magic of my fancy, thatI know not whether I am not the occasional victim of optical delusionconcerning the Gallipagos. For, often in scenes of social merriment, andespecially at revels held by candle-light in old-fashioned mansions, sothat shadows are thrown into the further recesses of an angular andspacious room, making them put on a look of haunted undergrowth oflonely woods, I have drawn the attention of my comrades by my fixed gazeand sudden change of air, as I have seemed to see, slowly emerging fromthose imagined solitudes, and heavily crawling along the floor, theghost of a gigantic tortoise, with “Memento * * * * *” burning in liveletters upon his back.
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