“_Mop._--Is it true, think you?
_Aut._--Very true;--why should I carry lies abroad?”
WINTER’S TALE.
[Sidenote: THE DROPPING-CAVE.]
In perusing in some of our older Gazetteers the half page devoted to
Cromarty, we find that, among the natural curiosities of the place,
there is a small cavern termed the Dropping-Cave, famous for its
stalactites and its petrifying springs. And though the progress of
modern discovery has done much to lower the wonder, by rendering it
merely one of thousands of the same class--for even among the cliffs
of the hill in which the cavern is perforated, there is scarcely a
spring that has not its border of coral-like petrifactions, and its
moss and grass and nettle-stalks of marble--the Dropping-Cave may well
be regarded as a curiosity still. It is hollowed, a few feet over
the beach, in the face of one of the low precipices which skirt the
entrance of the bay. From a crag which overhangs the opening there
falls a perpetual drizzle, which, settling on the moss and lichens
beneath, converts them into stone; and on entering the long narrow
apartment within, there may be seen by the dim light of the entrance
a series of springs, which filter through the solid rock above,
descending in so continual a shower, that even in the sultriest days
of midsummer, when the earth is parched and the grass has become brown
and withered, we may hear the eternal drop pattering against the rough
stones of the bottom, or tinkling in the recess within, like the
string of a harp struck to ascertain its tone. A stone flung into the
interior, after rebounding from side to side of the rock, falls with a
deep hollow plunge, as if thrown into the sea. Had the Dropping-Cave
been a cavern of Greece or Sicily, the classical mythology of these
countries would have tenanted it with the goddess of rains and vapour.
The walk to the cave is one of the most agreeable in the vicinity of
the town, especially in a fine morning of midsummer, an hour or so
after the sun has risen out of the Firth. The path to it has been
hollowed out of the hill-side by the feet of men and animals, and goes
winding over rocks and stones--now in a hollow, now on a height, anon
lost in the beach. In one of the recesses which open into the hill, a
clump of forest-trees has sprung up, and, lifting their boughs to the
edge of the precipice above, cover its rough iron features as if with
a veil; while, from the shade below, a fine spring, dedicated in some
remote age to “Our Ladye,” comes bubbling to the light with as pure and
copious a stream as in the days of the priest and the pilgrim. We see
the beach covered over with sea-shells and weeds, the cork buoys of the
fishermen, and fragments of wrecks. The air is full of fragrance. Only
look at yonder white patch in the hollow of the hill; ’tis a little
city of flowers, a whole community of one species--the meadow-sweet.
The fisherman scents it over the water, as he rows homeward in the cool
of the evening, a full half-mile from the shore. And see how the hill
rises above us, roughened with heath and fern and foxglove, and crested
a-top with a dark wood of fir. See how the beeches which have sprung
up on the declivity recline in nearly the angle of the hill, so that
their upper branches are only a few feet from the soil; reminding us,
in the midst of warmth and beauty, of the rough winds of winter and
the blasting influence of the spray. The insect denizens of the heath
and the wood are all on wing; see, there is the red bee, and there the
blue butterfly, and yonder the burnet-moth with its wings of vermilion,
and the large birdlike dragon-fly, and a thousand others besides,
all beautiful and all happy. And then the birds;--But why attempt a
description? The materials of thought and imagination are scattered
profusely around us; the wood the cliffs and the spring--the flowers
the insects and the birds--the shells the broken fragments of wreck and
the distant sail--the sea the sky and the opposite land--are all tones
of the great instrument Nature, which need only to be awakened by the
mind to yield its sweet music. And now we have reached the cave.
The Dropping-Cave ninety years ago was a place of considerable
interest; but the continuous shower which converted into stone the
plants and mosses on which it fell, and the dark recess which no one
had attempted to penetrate, and of whose extent imagination had formed
a thousand surmises, constituted some of merely the minor circumstances
that had rendered it such. Superstition had busied herself for ages
before in making it a scene of wonders. Boatmen, when sailing along
the shore in the night-time, had been startled by the apparition of a
faint blue light, which seemed glimmering from its entrance: on other
occasions than the one referred to in a former chapter, the mermaid
had been seen sitting on a rock a few yards before it, singing a low
melancholy song, and combing her long yellow hair with her fingers; and
a man who had been engaged in fishing crabs among the rocks, and was
returning late in the evening by the way of the cave, almost shared
the fate of its moss and lichens, when, on looking up, he saw an old
greyheaded man, with a beard that descended to his girdle, sitting in
the opening, and gazing wistfully on the sea.
I find some of these circumstances of terror embodied in verse by the
provincial poet whom I have quoted in an early chapter as an authority
regarding the Cromarty tradition of Wallace; and now, as then, I will
avail myself of his description:--
----“When round the lonely shore
The vex’d waves toil’d with deaf’ning roar,
And Midnight, from her lazy wain,
Heard wild winds roar and tides complain,
And groaning woods and shrieking sprites;--
Strange sounds from thence, and fearful lights,
Had caught the sailor’s ear and eye,
As drove his storm-press’d vessel by.
More fearful still, Tradition told
Of that dread cave a story old--
So very old, ages had pass’d
Since he who made had told it last.
’Twas thus it ran:--Of strange array
An aged man, whose locks of grey,
Like hill stream, flow’d his shoulders o’er,
For three long days on that lone shore
Sat moveless as the rocks around,
Moaning in low unearthly sound;
But whence he came, or why he stay’d,
None knew, and none to ask essay’d.
At length a lad drew near and spoke,
Craving reply. The figure shook
Like mirror’d shape on dimpling brook,
Or shadow flung on eddying smoke--
And the boy fled. The third day pass’d--
Fierce howl’d at night the angry blast
Brushing the waves; wild shrieks of death
Were heard these bristling cliffs beneath,
And cries for aid. The morning light
Gleam’d on a scene of wild affright.
Where yawns the cave, the rugged shore
With many a corse lay cover’d o’er,
And many a gorgeous fragment show’d
How fair the bark the storm subdued.”
[Sidenote: THE LEGEND OF WILLIE MILLAR.]
There was a Cromarty mechanic of the last age, named Willie Millar,
who used to relate a wonderful adventure which befell him in the cave.
Willie was a man of fertile invention, fond of a good story, and
zealous in the improvement of bad ones; but his zeal was evil spoken
of--the reformations he effected in this way being regarded as little
better than sinful, and his finest inventions as downright lying. There
was a smithy in the place, which, when he had become old and useless,
was his favourite resort. He would take up his seat on the forge
each evening, regularly as the evening came, and relate to a group
of delighted but too incredulous youngsters, some new passage in his
wonderful autobiography; which, though it seemed long enough to stretch
beyond the flood, received new accessions every night. So little,
indeed, had he in common with the small-minded class who, possessed of
only a limited number of narratives and ideas, go over and over these
as the hands of a clock pass continually over the same figures, that,
with but one exception in favour of the adventure of the cave, he
hardly ever told the same story twice.
There was a tradition current in Cromarty, that a town’s-man had once
passed through the Dropping-Cave, until he heard a pair of tongs rattle
over his head on the hearth of a farmhouse of Navity, a district of
the parish which lies fully three miles from the opening; and Willie,
who was, it seems, as hard of belief in such matters as if he himself
had never drawn on the credulity of others, resolved on testing the
story by exploring the cave. He sewed sprigs of rowan and wych-elm in
the hem of his waistcoat, thrust a Bible into one pocket and a bottle
of gin into the other, and providing himself with a torch, and a staff
of buckthorn which had been cut at the full of the moon, and dressed
without the assistance of iron or steel, he set out for the cave on a
morning of midsummer. It was evening ere he returned--his torch burnt
out, and his clothes stained with mould and slime, and soaked with
water.
After lighting the torch, he said, and taking a firm grasp of the
staff, he plunged fearlessly into the gloom before him. The cavern
narrowed and lowered as he proceeded; the floor, which was of a white
stone resembling marble, was hollowed into cisterns, filled with a
water so exceedingly pure that it sparkled to the light like spirits in
crystal, and from the roof there depended clusters of richly embossed
icicles of white stone, like those which, during a severe frost, hang
at the edge of a waterfall. The springs from above trickled along
their channelled sides, and then tinkled into the cisterns, like rain
from the eaves of a cottage after a thunder-shower. Perhaps he looked
too curiously around him when remarking all this; for so it was, that
at the ninth and last cistern he missed his footing, and, falling
forwards shattered his bottle of gin against the side of the cave.
The liquor ran into a little hollow of the marble, and, unwilling to
lose what he regarded as very valuable, and what certainly had cost
him some trouble and suffering to procure (for he had rowed half way
across the Firth for it in terror of the custom-house and a cockling
sea), he stooped down and drank till his breath failed him. Never was
there better Nantz; and, pausing to recover himself, he stooped and
drank, again and again. There were strange appearances when he rose.
A circular rainbow had formed round his torch; there was a blue mist
gathering in the hollows of the cave; the very roof and sides began to
heave and reel, as if the living rock were a Flushing lugger riding on
the ground-swell; and there was a low humming noise that came sounding
from the interior, like that of bees in a hawthorn thicket on an
evening of midsummer. Willie, however, had become much less timorous
than at first, and, though he could not well account for the fact, much
less disposed to wonder. And so on he went.
He found the cavern widen, and the roof rose so high that the light
reached only the snowy icicles which hung meteor-like over his head.
The walls were formed of white stone, ridged and furrowed like pieces
of drapery, and all before and around him there sparkled myriads of
crystals, like dewdrops in a spring morning. The sound of his footsteps
was echoed on either hand by a multitude of openings, in which the
momentary gleam of his torch was reflected, as he passed, on sheets of
water and ribs of rock, and which led, like so many arched corridors,
still deeper into the bowels of the hill. Nor, independently of the
continuous humming noise, were all the sounds of the cave those of
echo. At one time he could hear the wind moaning through the trees of
the wood above, and the scream of a hawk as if pouncing on its prey;
then there was the deafening blast of a smith’s bellows, and the clang
of hammers on an anvil; and anon a deep hollow noise resembling the
growling of a wild beast. All seemed terribly wild and unnatural; a
breeze came moaning along the cave, and shook the marble drapery of
the sides, as if it were formed of gauze or linen; the entire cave
seemed turning round like the cylinder of an engine, till the floor
stood upright and the adventurer fell heavily against it; and as the
torch hissed and sputtered in the water, he could see by its expiring
gleam that a full score of dark figures, as undefined as shadows by
moonlight, were flitting around him in the blue mist which now came
rolling in dense clouds from the interior. In a moment more all was
darkness, and he lay insensible amid the chill damps of the cave.
The rest of the adventure wonderfully resembled a dream. On returning
to consciousness, he found that the gloom around him had given place to
a dim red twilight, which flickered along the sides and roof like the
reflection of a distant fire. He rose, and grasping his staff staggered
forward. “It is sunlight,” thought he, “I shall find an opening
among the rocks of Eathie, and return home over the hill.” Instead,
however, of the expected outlet, he found the passage terminate in a
wonderful apartment, so vast in extent, that though an immense fire
of pine-trees, whole and unbroken from root to branch, threw up a red
wavering sheet of flame many yards in height, he could see in some
places neither the walls nor the roof. A cataract, like that of Foyers
during the long-continued rains of an open winter, descended in thunder
from one of the sides, and presenting its broad undulating front of
foam to the red gleam of the fire, again escaped into darkness through
a wide broken-edged gulf at the bottom. The floor of the apartment
appeared to be thickly strewed with human bones, half-burned and
blood-stained, and gnawed as if by cannibals; and directly in front of
the fire there was a low tomblike erection of dark-coloured stone, full
twenty yards in length, and roughened with grotesque hieroglyphics,
like those of a Runic obelisk. An enormous mace of iron, crusted with
rust and blood, reclined against the upper end; while a bugle of gold
hung by a chain of the same metal from a column at the bottom. Willie
seized the bugle, and winded a blast till the wide apartment shook
with the din; the waters of the cataract disappeared, as if arrested at
their source; and the ponderous cover of the tomb began to heave and
crackle, and pass slowly over the edge, as if assailed by the terrific
strength of some newly-awakened giant below. Willie again winded the
bugle; the cover heaved upwards, disclosing a corner of the chasm
beneath; and a hand covered with blood, and of such fearful magnitude
as to resemble only the conceptions of Egyptian sculpture, was slowly
stretched from the darkness towards the handle of the mace. Willie’s
resolution gave way, and, flinging down the horn, he rushed hurriedly
towards the passage. A yell of blended grief and indignation burst from
the tomb, as the immense cover again settled over it; the cataract came
dashing from its precipice with a heavier volume than before; and a
furious hurricane of mingled wind and spray that rushed howling from
the interior, well-nigh dashed the adventurer against the sides of the
rock. He succeeded, however, in gaining the passage, sick at heart
and nearly petrified with terror; a state of imperfect consciousness
succeeded, like that of a feverish dream, in which he retained a sort
of half conviction that he was lingering in the damps and darkness of
the cave, obstinately and yet unwillingly; and, on fully regaining his
recollection, he found himself lying across the ninth cistern, with the
fragments of the broken bottle on the one side, and his buckthorn staff
on the other. He could hear from the opening the dash of the advancing
waves against the rocks, and on leaping to the beach below, found that
his exploratory journey had occupied him a whole day.
[Sidenote: A BOY ADVENTURER.]
The adventure of Willie Millar formed at one time one of the most
popular traditions of Cromarty. It was current among the children not
more than eighteen years ago, when the cave was explored a second time,
but with a very different result, by a boy of the school in which the
writer of these legends had the misfortune of being regarded as the
greatest dunce and truant of his time. The character of Willie forms
the best possible commentary on _his_ story--the character of the boy
may perhaps throw some little light on his. When in his twelfth year,
he was by far the most inquisitive little fellow in the place. His
curiosity was insatiable. He had broken his toys when a child, that
he might see how they were constructed; and a watch which the owner
had thoughtlessly placed within his reach, narrowly escaped sharing a
similar fate. He dissected frogs and mice in the hope of discovering
the seat of life; and when one day found dibbling at the edge of a
spring, he said he was trying to penetrate to the source of water.
His schoolmaster nicknamed him “The _Senachie_,” for the stories with
which he beguiled his class-fellows of their tasks were without end or
number; the neighbours called him _Philosopher_, for he could point out
the star of the pole, with the Great Bear that continually walks round
it; and he used to affirm that there might be people in the moon, and
that the huge earth is only a planet. Having heard the legend of Willie
Millar, he set out one day to explore the cave; and when he returned
he had to tell that the legend was a mere legend, and that the cave,
though not without its wonders, owed, like the great ones of the earth,
much of its celebrity to the fears and the ignorance of mankind.
In climbing into the vestibule of the recess, his eye was attracted by
a piece of beautiful lacework, gemmed by the damps of the place, and
that stretched over a hollow in one of the sides. It was not, however,
a work of magic, but merely the web of a field-spider, that from its
acquaintance with lines and angles, seemed to have discovered a royal
road to geometry. The petrifying spring next attracted his notice. He
saw the mosses hardening into limestone--the stems already congealed,
and the upper shoots dying that they might become immortal. And there
came into his mind the story of one Niobe, of whom he had read in a
school-book, that, like the springs of the cave, wept herself into
stone, and the story too of the half-man half-marble prince of the
Arabian tale. “Strange,” thought the boy, “that these puny dwarfs of
the vegetable kingdom should become rock and abide for ever, when its
very giants, the chestnut trees of Etna and the cedars of Lebanon,
moulder away in the deep solitude of their forests, and become dust or
nothing.” Lighting his torch, he proceeded to examine the cavern. A
few paces brought him to the first cistern. He found the white table
of marble in which it is hollowed raised knee-height over the floor,
and the surface fretted into little cavities by the continual dropping,
like the surface of a thawing snow-wreath when beaten by a heavy
shower. As he strided over the ledge, a drop from above extinguished
his torch;--he groped his way back and rekindled it. He had seen the
first cistern described by the adventurer; and of course all the
others, with the immense apartment, the cataract, the tomb, the iron
mace, and the golden bugle, lay in the darkness beyond. But, alas!
when he again stepped forward, instead of the eight other hollows he
found the floor covered with one continuous pool, over which there rose
fast-contracting walls and a descending roof; and though he pressed
onward amid the water that splashed below, and the water that fell from
above--for his curiosity was unquenchable, and his clothes of a kind
which could not be made worse--it was only to find the rock closing
hopelessly before him, after his shoulders had at once pressed against
the opposite sides, and the icicles had passed through his hair. There
was no possibility of turning round, and so, creeping backwards like
a crab, he reached the first cistern, and in a moment after stood in
the lighted part of the cave. His feelings on the occasion were less
melancholy than those of the traveller, who, when standing beside the
two fountains of the Nile, “began in his sorrow to treat the inquiry
concerning its source as the effort of a distempered fancy.” But next
to the pleasure of erecting a system, is the pleasure of pulling
one down; and he felt it might be so even with regard to a piece of
traditionary history. Besides, there was a newly-fledged thought
which had come fluttering round him for the first time, that more than
half consoled him under his disappointment. He remembered that when
a child no story used to please him that was not both marvellous and
true--that a fact was as nothing to him disunited from the wonderful,
nor the wonderful disunited from fact. But the marvels of his childhood
had been melting away, one after one--the ghost, and the wraith, and
the fairy had all disappeared; and the wide world seemed to spread out
before him a tame and barren region, where truth dwelt in the forms of
commonplace, and in these only. He now felt for the first time that
it was far otherwise; and that so craving an instinct, instead of
perishing for lack of sustenance, would be fed as abundantly in the
future by philosophy and the arts, as it had been in the past by active
imaginations and a superstitious credulity.
[Sidenote: FIDDLER’S WELL.]
The path which, immediately after losing itself on the beach where it
passes the cave, rises by a kind of natural stair to the top of the
precipices, continues to ascend till it reaches a spring of limpid
water, which comes gushing out of the side of a bank covered with
moss and daisies: and which for more than a century has been known to
the town’s-people by the name of Fiddler’s Well. Its waters are said
to be medicinal, and there is a pretty tradition still extant of the
circumstance through which their virtues were first discovered, and to
which the spring owes its name.
Two young men of the place, who were much attached to each other, were
seized at nearly the same time by consumption. In one the progress
of the disease was rapid--he died two short months after he was
attacked by it; while the other, though wasted almost to a shadow,
had yet strength enough left to follow the corpse of his companion
to the grave. The name of the survivor was Fiddler--a name still
common among the seafaring men of the town. On the evening of the
interment he felt oppressed and unhappy; his imagination was haunted
by a thousand feverish shapes of open graves with bones mouldering
round their edges, and of coffins with the lids displaced; and after
he had fallen asleep, the images, which were still the same, became
more ghastly and horrible. Towards morning, however, they had all
vanished; and he dreamed that he was walking alone by the sea-shore
in a clear and beautiful day of summer. Suddenly, as he thought, some
person stepped up behind, and whispered in his ear, in the voice of
his deceased companion, “Go on, Willie; I shall meet you at _Stormy_.”
There is a rock in the neighbourhood of Fiddler’s Well, so called from
the violence with which the sea beats against it when the wind blows
strongly from the east. On hearing the voice he turned round, and
seeing no one, he went on, as he thought, to the place named, in the
hope of meeting his friend, and sat down on a bank to wait his coming;
but he waited long--lonely and dejected; and then remembering that he
for whom he waited was dead, he burst into tears. At this moment a
large field-bee came humming from the west, and began to fly round his
head. He raised his hand to brush it away; it widened its circle, and
then came humming into his ear as before. He raised his hand a second
time, but the bee would not be scared off; it hummed ceaselessly round
and round him, until at length its murmurings seemed to be fashioned
into words, articulated in the voice of his deceased companion--“Dig,
Willie, and drink!” it said; “Dig, Willie, and drink!” He accordingly
set himself to dig, and no sooner had he torn a sod out of the bank
than a spring of clear water gushed from the hollow; and the bee
taking a wider circle, and humming in a voice of triumph that seemed
to emulate the sound of a distant trumpet, flew away. He looked after
it, but as he looked the images of his dream began to mingle with those
of the waking world; the scenery of the hill seemed obscured by a dark
cloud, in the centre of which there glimmered a faint light; the rocks,
the sea, the long declivity, faded into the cloud; and turning round
he saw only a dark apartment, and the faint beams of morning shining in
at a window. He rose, and after digging the well, drank of the water
and recovered. And its virtues are still celebrated; for though the
water be only simple water, it must be drunk in the morning, and as it
gushes from the bank; and with pure air, exercise, and early rising for
its auxiliaries, it continues to work cures.