ENCHANTED CAVERNS
Along the bolder coast-line of this island, where the cliffs, without
being very high, are steep and frowning, there are some remarkable
caves, which I to-day visited with Mr. Hoseason, in his boat--he having
sailed over from Yell Island. To me, at least, they seemed remarkable,
principally by reason of the various and vivid colours which the rock
perforated by them begins to display as soon as their entrance is passed.
This rock, as elsewhere in the Shetlands, is sedimentary, but broken
here and there with veins of quartz, often of considerable thickness,
which seem to have been shot up in a molten state and to have afterwards
cooled--"seem," I say, for I have no proper knowledge as to their
geological formation. This quartz, which when exposed to the light of day
is white or whitish, is here of a deep rust-red, and this, distributed in
long zigzag lines or meanderings, is sufficiently striking, but nothing
compared to the much brighter reds, the lakes, and brilliant greens with
which the interior of the cavern is, as it were, painted; so that the
whole effect, lit up by the candles which we used as torches, resembled,
in a surprising and quite unexpected way, those highly coloured and very
artificial-looking representations of natural scenery which one sees
on the stage--in pantomimes more particularly or on some very florid
drop-scene. These colours are due to some low form of vegetation which
is spread like a wash over the face of the stratified rock, but it seems
surprising, since one is accustomed to associate colour with light,
that in the absence of all sun they should not only exist, but be so
very brilliant. I have never seen anything like such vivid hues on the
surface of rock or cliff exposed to the light of day, nor, indeed, in
any landscape, if flowers and the autumn tints of leaves are excluded.
Gaudily painted stage scenery, some enchanted or robber's cavern in a
pantomime--Ali Baba's, for instance--is really the best comparison I
can think of, nor shall I ever again think these exaggerated. Nature
is really harder to outdo or burlesque than one may fancy--even on
the stage, where the effort is so constantly, and, one would swear,
successfully made.
In shape these caverns are long and narrow--throatal, one might call
them--and the sea, with the many weird and uncouth noises that it makes
as it licks, tongue-like, in and out of them, helps to suggest this
resemblance. Though their height is really but moderate, yet, owing to
the narrowness of their walls, they have the appearance of being lofty,
especially near the entrance, or where, after descending till it nearly
reaches the water, the roof is suddenly carried up again. For the most
part, however, the height decreases gradually, with the breadth, till at
length the cave ends in a low, dark tunnel, which the sea almost fills,
and up which the boat can no longer proceed. Yet far beyond, where all is
opaque darkness, one still hears the muffled wash and sob of the waves
as they ceaselessly eat and eat into the hidden bowels of the rock. As
the whole force and vastness of the ocean lies beyond this little tip
of its tongue, to where may not such burrows extend? and might not, by
a knowledge of their position and the direction in which they run, some
inland towns be supplied with the blessing of sea-water?
The water in these caverns is delightfully clear, revealing in every
detail, through its lucid green, the smooth-rolled pebbles and great
white rounded boulders which strew, or rather make, their floor. To look
down at them is like looking up into the arched roof of some other cave.
One might think it the reflection of the one overhead, till, glancing up,
the difference is remarked--jagged, bright-hued peaks and niches instead
of smooth, even whiteness. This effect, as of a roof beneath one, is
due, I think, to the continuation downwards of the sides of the cavern,
for this gives the same vaulted appearance, but reversed, that there is
overhead, and the mind, as with the image on the retina of the eye, soon
sets it the right way up.
These caves must have been known from time immemorial to as many as were
accustomed to coast round the island, and it is interesting to think
of who, and what kind of craft may, from age to age, have visited or
sheltered in them. Recently, however, they were first explored, if not
discovered, by Mr. Hoseason (who has for years rented the island and done
his best to protect the bird life upon it) in the spring of the preceding
year, and they were at that time tenanted by numbers both of shags and
rock-pigeons, who sat incubating their eggs on any suitable ledge or
projection of the rock. Of the latter birds, to-day, there were none, but
several of the former, though so late in the season, were sitting on eggs
which, to judge by their whiteness, must have been but lately laid, and,
no doubt, represented a second brood, whilst others, whose young were
still with them on the nest, although full-fledged and almost as big as
themselves, plunged, attended by these, into the water. The hollow sounds
of splash after splash were echoed and re-echoed from sea to roof, and
the air seemed filled with sepulchral croakings. It was easy to follow
these birds as they swam midway between the surface of the water and the
white pebbled floor of the cavern, and I was thus able to confirm my
previous conviction that the feet alone are used by them in swimming,
without any help from the wings, which are kept all the while closed. I
have many times observed this before, but never so clearly or for such a
length of time.
The young birds, after diving, made for the nearest rock or ledge on
to which they could scramble, and they were so unwilling again to take
the water that some of them allowed themselves to be caught by us,
though showing every sign of fear--indeed, of extreme terror--which
one might naturally suppose them to feel. This is a puzzling thing to
understand--at least, to me it is. An aquatic bird that swims and dives
all as easily as it breathes, and which has just before plunged into
the water from a considerable height, stands now upon a rock but little
above its surface, and watches a boat, the object of its dread, coming
nearer and nearer, till at last it stops in front of it, and the hand
is stretched out to seize and take, without ever escaping, which it
might easily do in the way that it has just before done. What is the
explanation? We may suppose, perhaps, that these young birds have not yet
got to look upon the ocean as a place of long abode, that they enter it
only with the idea of getting quickly out again, and that the rock is as
yet so much more their true home that they cling to it in preference, and
may even have a feeling of safety in being there. But if this last were
the case, why should they leave it in the first instance? There would be
no difficulty in understanding the matter if they refused to take the
sea at all, but having done so once, it seems strange that they should
so fear or dislike to, again. Possibly the having soon to come out--as
being impelled to do so--and finding themselves no better off, but
menaced as before, may give a feeling of inevitability and hopelessness
of escape, sufficient to take away the power of effort. But this I do
not believe--despair hardly belongs to animals, and if it did, imminent
peril, with at least a temporary refuge at hand, ought to conquer such
a feeling. As the birds which we thus caught were only in the water for
a very little while, exhaustion could have had nothing to do with their
self-surrender. The paralysis of fear ought, one would think, to have
acted from the first, instead of supervening after a period of activity,
but perhaps mere bewilderment, by preventing sustained exertion, may
have produced a similar effect. Had it always been the parent bird
that led the way on the occasion of the first leap from the rock, this
powerlessness on the part of the young to leave it a second time might
be attributed to her absence--but as far as I can remember there was
no fixed rule in this respect. Both old and young birds generally went
off with great unwillingness, but at other times this was not nearly so
marked.
In their swimming so quickly to the shore again, after their first
plunge, and refusing thereafter to leave it, these young cormorants
brought to my mind those amphibious lizards of the Galapagos Islands
which Darwin mentions as never entering the sea to avoid danger, but, on
the contrary, always swimming to land on the slightest alarm, though it
might be there precisely that danger awaited them. This "strange anomaly"
Darwin explains in the following manner: "Perhaps this singular piece of
apparent stupidity may be accounted for by the circumstance that this
reptile has no enemy whatever on shore, whereas at sea it must often fall
a prey to the numerous sharks. Hence, probably, urged by a fixed and
hereditary instinct that the shore is its place of safety, whatever the
emergency may be, it there takes refuge." The shag, as far as I know, has
nothing particular to fear, either by sea or shore. His only enemy is
man, who is not confined to either, but is as brutal and ignorant on the
one as the other. But in avoiding danger the instinct of any animal would
probably be to leave the place to which it was less accustomed, and run
to that with which it was familiar--and this we constantly see. Thus a
land-bird that was beginning to take to the water would leave it for the
land on any alarm, whilst a water-bird under similar circumstances would
make for the water. But all water-birds were probably land-birds once, so
that we might expect sometimes to see in their young that old instinct
of taking refuge there, which had become reversed in the parents. We
might also expect to find greater dislike, on their part, to entering
the water; and certainly the young shags did enter it very unwillingly
from the first. So, indeed, for that matter did the old ones, as already
stated, but with them there was the love of being on their nests, or at
least their nesting-ledges--a late continuance of the breeding habits--to
be overcome. When once they had plunged, however, they did not, like the
young birds, swim at once to the shore again, but made for the open sea,
and it must have required a strong contrary instinct on the part of the
latter not to follow them. The lizards on the Galapagos Islands have, no
doubt, also taken to the sea gradually, so that their habit of swimming
to the shore when alarmed may, possibly, be due to a long-enduring
ancestral instinct, having nothing to do with sharks.
We passed, whilst exploring one of these caverns, just beneath a ledge
of rock, where a shag sat brooding over two tiny little things, but
just hatched, perfectly naked, and jet black all over. This poor bird
showed an anxiety which could hardly have been overpassed in the most
devoted of human mothers, and I almost believe her sufferings were as
great--for surely all extremities are equal. Her hoarse, bellowing cries
reverberated through all the place, and helped, with the gloom, the murky
light flung by our candles, the lurid colouring, and the deep, gurgling
noises of the sea, to make a weird, Tartarean picture, difficult to
excel. But it was not in sound alone that she vented her displeasure, for
she was angry as well as alarmed. As the boat passed, she rose on the
nest, and, in a frenzy of apprehension, snapped her bill, and alternately
advanced and retreated her long, snake-like and darkly iridescent green
neck. Though my head was but a foot or two away from her, she kept her
place on the nest, and becoming more and more beside herself, behaved,
at last, in such a manner as it is difficult to describe, but which upon
the human plane and amongst the lower classes, is called "taking on." Not
until I actually took up one of the young ones, to examine it--for this I
could not resist--did she fling herself into the water, and then it was
with a dramatic suddenness that looked like despair. It was as though
she had attempted suicide, but no cormorant, I suppose, would do so in
such a way.
What a strange sight this was! What a gargoyle of a creature--alive, in
these gloomy shades! It seemed not a bird, but something in _The Faerie
Queen_, one of
The uncouth things of faerie,
--a line, by the way, which only resembles Spenser by being, probably,
unfamiliar to most people. But our knowledge makes things commonplace.
Did the fairies exist, they would be classified, and, with Latin names
and description of their habits, would be no more _really_ the fairies
than are birds or beasts. Let one but know nothing, and these caverns are
enchanted.
It is not often that one has so close a view of a shag as this. My
head was but a foot or so off, and on a level with her own; my eyes
looked into her glass-green ones. One thing about her struck me with
wonder, and that was the intense brilliancy of the whole inside of her
mouth, which, in a blaze of gamboge, seemed to imitate, in miniature,
the cavern in which she sat. Most stupidly I did not think to open the
bill of the chick whilst I had it in my hand, in order to see what its
mouth was like. As bearing on the conjecture which I have formed, this
would have interested me, and such an opportunity is not likely to come
again. I noticed, however, that the naked skin about the beak, which,
in the grown bird, is thus vividly coloured, was very much lighter,
and consequently not nearly so handsome, in the larger fledged young
ones. That here the intensity of the hue was gained gradually through
sexual selection, I--being a believer in sexual selection--can have no
doubt, and the lesser degree of it in the young bird would be due to
a well-known principle of inheritance, which has been pointed out or,
rather, discovered by Darwin. If, therefore, the inner colouring has been
acquired in the same manner, it ought also to be first light and become
brighter by degrees.[2] I must now watch for these young cormorants to
open their bills, for it is a habit which they share, more or less, with
their parents, and out of it, as I believe, the adornment has grown.
[Footnote 2: This is, in fact, the case.]
I have no doubt that numbers of shags roost in these caverns during the
night, for when I was lost on Raasey Isle in Skye, I came to a huge
vaulted chamber in the cliffs, into which scores--perhaps hundreds--both
of these birds and the common cormorant flew, after the sun had set. When
they were all settled, every ledge, crevice, and pinnacle seemed tenanted
by them, and never shall I forget the gloom, the grandeur, and the
loneliness of this scene. I admired it, though naked, except for a torn
pair of trousers which were half wet through. I should like to see them
come flying into their caves here also, where I am not so forlorn; but
the distance of my hut from this part of the shore, the lateness of the
hour up to which the light lasts, and my having to cook my supper, makes
this difficult, or, at least, inconvenient. But if I cannot see them fly
in in the evening, I may see them fly out in the morning, and that should
be "a sight for sair een."
Whilst rowing to these caves we had seen one black guillemot, or "tysty,"
flying over the sea with a fish in its bill, and another swimming with
a young one by its side. The latter was of a greyish colour, and about
a third smaller than the parent bird, which in shape and movements it
closely resembled. These birds, therefore, breed in the Shetlands--a fact
well known before, I believe; but I like to rediscover things. Another
and more interesting thing that we saw was a seal swimming very fast,
and leaping, at intervals, out of the water. I think I may use this
expression, for if he did not leap quite free of it, he very nearly did,
so as to show his whole body. He rose in a very bluff, bold way, with
great impetus, as it seemed, and went straight, or nearly straight up,
for a little, before falling forward again. Each time one seemed to hear
the splash and the blow, but this was only in imagination, the distance
being too great. When I say that this seal was swimming very fast I am
giving my impression merely. All I saw was the leaps, which were quickly
repeated, yet with a good space between each, and all in one direction.
Between them, therefore, he must have been speeding along at a great
pace, so that, each time he plunged up, it was as from a spring-board of
impetus and energy. I do not remember reading of seals leaping thus out
of the water, but Mr. Hoseason had seen them do so before, though not
often. There was a fine joyous spirit in the thing--"there is" joy, as
well as "sorrow on the sea."
It is good to see an animal like this in this United Kingdom of ours--or
at least in its seas--for, for a moment, it makes one think one is out of
it, and in some wilder, more life-teeming part of the world. It is hard
to have to live in a country, glorified as being "a network of railways,"
and to have no taste for railways. Oh, wretched modern world of ugliness,
noise, improvement and extermination, what a vile place art thou becoming
for one who loves nature, and only cares for man in books!--the best
books _bien entendu_.