"Strange marble stones, here larger and there less,
And of full various forms, which still increase
In height and bulk by a continual drop.
Which upon each distilling from the top,
And falling still exactly on the crown.
There break themselves to mists, which, trickling down.
Crust into stone, and (but with leisure) swell
The sides, and still advance the miracle."--CHARLES COTTON.
It is low water in the Firth of Cromarty during stream tides, between
six and seven o'clock in the evening; and my uncle Sandy, in returning
from his work at the close of the day, used not unfrequently, when,
according to the phrase of the place, "there was a tide in the water,"
to strike down the hillside, and spend a quiet hour in the ebb. I
delighted to accompany him on these occasions. There are professors of
Natural History that know less of living nature than was known by Uncle
Sandy; and I deemed it no small matter to have all the various
productions of the sea with which he was acquainted pointed out to me in
these walks, and to be in possession of his many curious anecdotes
regarding them.
He was a skilful crab and lobster fisher, and knew every hole and
cranny, along several miles of rocky shore, in which the creatures were
accustomed to shelter, with not a few of their own peculiarities of
character. Contrary to the view taken by some of our naturalists, such
as Agassiz, who hold that the crab--a genus comparatively recent in its
appearance in creation--is less embryotic in its character, and higher
in its standing, than the more ancient lobster, my uncle regarded the
lobster as a more highly developed and more intelligent animal than the
crab. The hole in which the lobster lodges has almost always two
openings, he has said, through one of which it sometimes contrives to
escape when the other is stormed by the fisher; whereas the crab is
usually content, like the "rat devoid of soul," with a hole of only one
opening; and, besides, gets so angry in most cases with his assailant,
as to become more bent on assault than escape, and so loses himself
through sheer loss of temper. And yet the crab has, he used to add, some
points of intelligence about him too. When, as sometimes happened, he
got hold, in his dark narrow recess in the rock, of some luckless digit,
my uncle showed me how that, after the first tremendous squeeze, he
began always to experiment upon what he had got, by alternately
slackening and straitening his grasp, as if to ascertain whether it had
life in it, or was merely a piece of dead matter; and that the only way
to escape him, on these trying occasions, was to let the finger lie
passively between his nippers, as if it were a bit of stick or tangle;
when, apparently deeming it such, he would be sure to let it go;
whereas, on the least attempt to withdraw it, he would at once straiten
his gripe, and not again relax it for mayhap half an hour. In dealing
with the lobster, on the other hand, the fisher had to beware that he
did not depend too much on the hold he had got of the creature, if it
was merely a hold of one of the great claws. For a moment it would
remain passive in his grasp; he would then be sensible of a slight
tremor in the captured limb, and mayhap hear a slight crackle; and,
_presto_, the captive would straightway be off like a dart through the
deep-water hole, and only the limb remain in the fisher's hand. My uncle
has, however, told me that lobsters do not always lose their limbs with
the necessary judgment. They throw them off when suddenly frightened,
without first waiting to consider whether the sacrifice of a pair of
legs is the best mode of obviating the danger. On firing a musket
immediately over a lobster just captured, he has seen it throw off both
its great claws in the sudden extremity of its terror, just as a
panic-struck soldier sometimes throws away his weapons. Such, in kind,
were the anecdotes of Uncle Sandy. He instructed me, too, how to find,
amid thickets of laminaria and fuci, the nest of the lump-fish, and
taught me to look well in its immediate neighbourhood for the male and
female fish, especially for the male; and showed me further, that the
hard-shelled spawn of this creature may, when well washed, be eaten raw,
and forms at least as palatable a viand in that state as the imported
caviare of Russia and the Caspian. There were instances in which the
common crow acted as a sort of jackal to us in our lump-fish
explorations. We would see him busied at the side of some fuci-covered
pool, screaming and cawing as if engaged in combating an enemy; and, on
going up to the place, we used to find the lump-fish he had killed fresh
and entire, but divested of the eyes, which we found, as a matter of
course, that the assailant, in order to make sure of victory, had taken
the precaution of picking out at an early stage of the contest.
Nor was it with merely the edible that we busied ourselves on these
journeys. The brilliant metallic _plumage_ of the sea mouse
(_Aphrodita_), steeped as in the dyes of the rainbow, excited our
admiration time after time; and still higher wonder used to be awakened
by a much rarer annelid, brown, and slender as a piece of rope-yarn, and
from thirty to forty feet in length, which no one save my uncle had ever
found along the Cromarty shores, and which, when broken in two, as
sometimes happened in the measuring, divided its vitality so equally
between the pieces, that each was fitted, we could not doubt, though
unable to repeat in the case the experiment of Spallanzani, to set up as
an independent existence, and carry on business for itself. The
annelids, too, that form for themselves tubular dwellings built up of
large grains of sand (_amphitrites_), always excited our interest. Two
hand-shaped tufts of golden-hued setae--furnished, however, with greatly
more than the typical number of fingers--rise from the shoulders of
these creatures, and must, I suspect, be used as hands in the process of
building; at least the hands of the most practised builder could not set
stones with nicer skill than is exhibited by these worms in the setting
of the grains which compose their cylindrical dwellings--dwellings that,
from their form and structure, seem suited to remind the antiquary of
the round towers of Ireland, and, from the style of their masonry, of
old Cyclopean walls. Even the mason-wasps and bees are greatly inferior
workmen to these mason _amphitrites_. I was introduced also, in our ebb
excursions, to the cuttle-fish and the sea-hare, and shown how the one,
when pursued by an enemy, discharges a cloud of ink to conceal its
retreat, and that the other darkens the water around it with a lovely
purple pigment, which my uncle was pretty sure would make a rich dye,
like that extracted of old by the Tyrians from a whelk which he had
often seen on the beach near Alexandria. I learned, too, to cultivate an
acquaintance with some two or three species of doris, that carry their
arboraceous, tree-like lungs on their backs, as Macduff's soldiers
carried the boughs of Birnam wood to the Hill of Dunsinane; and I soon
acquired a sort of affection for certain shells, which bore, as I
supposed, a more exotic aspect than their neighbours. Among these were,
_Trochus Zizyphinus_, with its flame-like markings of crimson, on a
ground of paley-brown; _Patella pellucida_, with its lustrous rays of
vivid blue on its dark epidermis, that resemble the sparks of a firework
breaking against a cloud; and, above all, _Cypraea Europea_, a not rare
shell further to the north, but so little abundant in the Firth of
Cromarty, as to render the live animal, when once or twice in a season I
used to find it creeping on the laminaria at the extreme outer edge of
the tide-line, with its wide orange mantle flowing liberally around it,
somewhat of a prize. In short, the tract of sea-bottom laid dry by the
ebb formed an admirable school, and Uncle Sandy an excellent teacher,
under whom I was not in the least disposed to trifle; and when, long
after, I learned to detect old-marine bottoms far out of sight of the
sea--now amid the ancient forest-covered Silurians of central England,
and anon opening to the light on some hillside among the Mountain
Limestones of our own country--I have felt how very much I owed to his
instructions.
His facts wanted a vocabulary adequately fitted to represent them; but
though they "lacked a commodity of good names," they were all founded on
careful observation, and possessed that first element of
respectability--perfect originality: they were all acquired by himself.
I owed more, however, to the habit of observation which he assisted me
in forming, than even to his facts; and yet some of these were of high
value. He has shown me, for instance, that an immense granitic boulder
in the neighbourhood of the town, known for ages as the Clach Malloch,
or Cursed Stone, stands so exactly in the line of low water, that the
larger stream-tides of March and September lay dry its inner side, but
never its outer one;--round the outer side there are always from two to
four inches of water; and such had been the case for at least a hundred
years before, in his father's and grandfather's days--evidence enough of
itself, I have heard him say, that the relative levels of sea and land
were not altering; though during the lapsed century the waves had so
largely encroached on the low flat shores, that elderly men of his
acquaintance, long since passed away, had actually held the plough when
young where they had held the rudder when old. He used, too, to point
out to me the effect of certain winds upon the tides. A strong hasty
gale from the east, if coincident with a spring-tide, sent up the waves
high upon the beach, and cut away whole roods of the soil; but the gales
that usually kept larger tides from falling during ebb were prolonged
gales from the west. A series of these, even when not very high, left
not unfrequently from one to two feet water round the Clach Malloch,
during stream-tides, that would otherwise have laid its bottom bare--a
proof, he used to say, that the German Ocean, from its want of breadth,
could not be heaped up against our coasts to the same extent, by the
violence of a very powerful east wind, as the Atlantic by the force of a
comparatively moderate westerly one. It is not improbable that the
philosophy of the Drift Current, and of the apparently reactionary Gulf
Stream, may be embodied in this simple remark.
The woods on the lower slopes of the hill, when there was no access to
the zones covered save at low ebb by the sea, furnished me with
employment of another kind. I learned to look with interest on the
workings of certain insects, and to understand some of at least their
simpler instincts. The large Diadem Spider, which spins so strong a web,
that, in pressing my way through the furze thickets, I could hear its
white silken cords crack as they yielded before me, and which I found
skilled, like an ancient magician, in the strange art of rendering
itself invisible in the clearest light, was an especial favourite;
though its great size, and the wild stories I had read about the bite of
its cogener the tarantula, made me cultivate its acquaintance somewhat
at a distance. Often, however, have I stood beside its large web, when
the creature occupied its place in the centre, and, touching it with a
withered grass stalk, I have seen it sullenly swing on the lines "with
its hands," and then shake them with a motion so rapid, that--like
Carathis, the mother of the Caliph Vathek, who, when her hour of doom
had come, "glanced off in a rapid whirl, which rendered her
invisible"--the eye failed to see either web or insect for minutes
together. Nothing appeals more powerfully to the youthful fancy than
those coats, rings, and amulets of eastern lore, that conferred on their
possessors the gift of invisibility. I learned, too, to take an especial
interest in what, though they belong to a different family, are known as
the Water _Spiders_; and have watched them speeding by fits and starts,
like skaters on the ice, across the surface of some woodland spring or
streamlet--fearless walkers on the waters, that, with true faith in the
integrity of the implanted instinct, never made shipwreck in the eddy or
sank in the pool. It is to these little creatures that Wordsworth refers
in one of his sonnets on sleep:--
"O sleep, thou art to me
A fly that up and down himself doth shove
Upon a fretful rivulet; now _above_,
Now _on_ the water, vexed with mockery."
As shown, however, to the poet himself on one occasion, somewhat to his
discomfort, by assuredly no mean authority--Mr. James Wilson--the
"vexed" "fly," though one of the hemipterous insects, never uses its
wings, and so never gets "_above_" the water. Among my other favourites
were the splendid dragon-flies, the crimson-speckled Burnet moths, and
the small azure butterflies, that, when fluttering among delicate
harebells and crimson-tipped daisies, used to suggest to me, long ere I
became acquainted with the pretty figure of Moore,[3] or even ere the
figure had been produced, the idea of flowers that had taken to flying.
The wild honey bees, too, in their several species, had peculiar charms
for me. There were the buff-coloured carders, that erected over their
honey-jars domes of moss; the lapidary red-tipped bees, that built amid
the recesses of ancient cairns, and in old dry stone walls, and were so
invincibly brave in defending their homesteads, that they never gave up
the quarrel till they died; and, above all, the yellow-zoned
humble-bees, that lodged deep in the ground along the dry sides of
grassy banks, and were usually wealthier in honey than any of their
cogeners, and existed in larger communities. But the herd-boys of the
parish, and the foxes of its woods and brakes, shared in my interest in
the wild honey bees, and, in the pursuit of something else than
knowledge, were ruthless robbers of their nests. I often observed, that
the fox, with all his reputed shrewdness, is not particularly knowing on
the subject of bees. He makes as dead a set on a wasp's nest as on that
of the carder or humble-bee, and gets, I doubt not, heartily stung for
his pains; for though, as shown by the marks of his teeth, left on
fragments of the paper combs scattered about, he attempts eating the
young wasps in the chrysalis state, the undevoured remains seem to argue
that he is but little pleased with them as food. There were occasions,
however, in which even the herd-boys met with only disappointment in
their bee-hunting excursions; and in one notable instance, the result of
the adventure used to be spoken of in school and elsewhere, under our
breath and in secret, as something very horrible. A party of boys had
stormed a humble-bees' nest on the side of the old chapel-brae, and,
digging inwards along the narrow winding earth passage, they at length
came to a grinning human skull, and saw the bees issuing thick from out
a round hole at its base--the _foramen magnum_. The wise little workers
had actually formed their nest within the hollow of the head, once
occupied by the busy brain; and their spoilers, more scrupulous than
Samson of old, who seems to have enjoyed the meat brought forth out of
the eater, and the sweetness extracted from the strong, left in very
great consternation their honey all to themselves.
One of my discoveries of this early period would have been deemed a not
unimportant one by the geologist. Among the woods of the hill, a short
half-mile from the town, there is a morass of comparatively small
extent, but considerable depth, which had been laid open by the bursting
of a waterspout on the uplands, and in which the dark peaty chasm
remained unclosed, though the event had happened ere my birth, until I
had become old and curious enough thoroughly to explore it. It was a
black miry ravine, some ten or twelve feet in depth. The bogs around
waved thick with silvery willows of small size; but sticking out from
the black sides of the ravine itself, and in some instances stretched
across it from side to side, lay the decayed remains of huge giants of
the vegetable world, that had flourished and died long ages ere, in at
least our northern part of the island, the course of history had begun.
There were oaks of enormous girth, into whose coal-black substance one
could dig as easily with a pickaxe as one digs into a bank of clay; and
at least one noble elm, which ran across the little stream that
trickled, rather than flowed, along the bottom of the hollow, and which
was in such a state of keeping, that I have scooped out of its trunk,
with the unassisted hand, a way for the water. I have found in the
ravine--which I learned very much to like as a scene of exploration,
though I never failed to quit it sadly bemired--handfuls of hazel-nuts,
of the ordinary size, but black as jet, with the cups of acorns, and
with twigs of birch that still retained almost unchanged their silvery
outer crust of bark, but whose ligneous interior existed as a mere pulp.
I have even laid open, in layers of a sort of unctuous clay, resembling
fuller's earth, leaves of oak, birch, and hazel, that had fluttered in
the wind thousands of years before; and there was one happy day in which
I succeeded in digging from out the very bottom of the excavation a huge
fragment of an extraordinary-looking deer's horn. It was a broad,
massive, strange-looking piece of bone, evidently old-fashioned in its
type; and so I brought it home in triumph to Uncle James, as the
antiquary of the family, assured that he could tell me all about it.
Uncle James paused in the middle of his work; and, taking the horn in
his hand, surveyed it leisurely on every side. "That is the horn, boy,"
he at length said, "of no deer that now lives in this country. We have
the red deer, and the fallow deer, and the roe; and none of them have
horns at all like that. I never saw an elk; but I am pretty sure this
broad, plank-like horn can be none other than the horn of an elk." My
uncle set aside his work; and, taking the horn in his hand, went out to
the shop of a cabinet-maker in the neighbourhood, where there used to
work from five to six journeymen. They all gathered round him to examine
it, and agreed in the decision that it was an entirely different sort of
horn from any borne by the existing deer of Scotland, and that this
surmise regarding it was probably just. And, apparently to enhance the
marvel, a neighbour, who was lounging in the shop at the time, remarked,
in a tone of sober gravity, that it had lain in the Moss of the Willows
"for perhaps half a century." There was positive anger in the tone of my
uncle's reply. "Half a century, Sir!!" he exclaimed; "was the elk a
native of Scotland half a century ago? There is no notice of the elk,
Sir, in British history. That horn must have lain in the Moss of the
Willows for thousands of years!" "Ah, ha, James, ah, ha," ejaculated the
neighbour, with a sceptical shake of the head; but as neither he nor any
one else dared meet my uncle on historical ground, the controversy took
end with the ejaculation. I soon added to the horn of the elk that of a
roe, and part of that of a red deer, found in the same ravine; and the
neighbours, impressed by Uncle James's view, used to bring strangers to
look at them. At length, unhappily, a relation settled in the south, who
had shown me kindness, took a fancy to them; and, smit by the charms of
a gorgeous paint-box which he had just sent me, I made them over to him
entire. They found their way to London, and were ultimately lodged in
the collection of some obscure virtuoso, whose locality or name I have
been unable to trace.
The Cromarty Sutors have their two lines of caves--an ancient line
hollowed by the waves many centuries ago, when the sea stood, in
relation to the land, from fifteen to thirty feet higher along our
shores than it does now; and a modern line, which the surf is still
engaged in scooping out. Many of the older caves are lined with
stalactites, deposited by springs that, filtering through the cracks and
fissures of the gneiss, find lime enough in their passage to acquire
what is known as a _petrifying_, though, in reality, only an incrusting
quality. And these stalactites, under the name of "white stones made by
the water," formed of old--as in that Cave of Slains specially mentioned
by Buchanan and the Chroniclers, and in those caverns of the Peak so
quaintly described by Cotton--one of the grand marvels of the place.
Almost all the old gazetteers sufficiently copious in their details to
mention Cromarty at all, refer to its "Dropping Cave" as a marvellous
marble-producing cavern; and this "Dropping Cave" is but one of many
that look out upon the sea from the precipices of the southern Sutor, in
whose dark recesses the drops ever tinkle, and the stony ceilings ever
grow. The wonder could not have been deemed a great or very rare one by
a man like the late Sir George Mackenzie of Coul, well known from his
travels in Iceland, and his experiments on the inflammability of the
diamond; but it so happened, that Sir George, curious to see the sort of
stones to which the old gazetteers referred, made application to the
minister of the parish for a set of specimens; and the minister
straightway deputed the commission, which he believed to be not a
difficult one, to one of his poorer parishioners, an old nailer, as a
means of putting a few shillings in his way.
It so happened, however, that the nailer had lost his wife by a sad
accident, only a few weeks before; and the story went abroad that the
poor woman was, as the townspeople expressed it, "coming back." She had
been very suddenly hurried out of the world. When going down the quay
after nightfall one evening, with a parcel of clean linen for a sailor,
her relative, she had missed footing on the pier edge, and,
half-brained, half-drowned, had been found in the morning, stone dead,
at the bottom of the harbour. And now, as if pressed by some unsettled
business, she used to be seen, it was said, hovering after nightfall
about her old dwelling, or sauntering along the neighbouring street;
nay, there were occasions, according to the general report, in which she
had even exchanged words with some of the neighbours, little to their
satisfaction. The words, however, seemed in every instance to have
wonderfully little to do with the affairs of another world. I remember
seeing the wife of a neighbour rush into my mother's one evening about
this time, speechless with terror, and declare, after an awful pause,
during which she had lain half-fainting in a chair, that she had just
seen Christy. She had been engaged, as the night was falling, but ere
darkness had quite set in, in piling up a load of brushwood for fuel
outside the door, when up started the spectre on the other side of the
heap, attired in the ordinary work-day garb of the deceased, and, in a
light and hurried tone, asked, as Christy might have done ere the fatal
accident, for a share of the brushwood. "Give me some of that _hag_,"
said the ghost; "you have plenty--I have none." It was not known whether
or no the nailer had seen the apparition; but it was pretty certain he
believed in it; and as the "Dropping Cave" is both dark and solitary,
and had forty years ago a bad name to boot--for the mermaid had been
observed disporting in front of it even at mid-day, and lights and
screams heard from it at nights--it must have been a rather formidable
place to a man living in the momentary expectation of a visit from a
dead wife. So far as could be ascertained--for the nailer himself was
rather close in the matter--he had not entered the cave at all. He
seemed, judging from the marks of scraping left along the sides for
about two or three feet from the narrow opening, to have taken his stand
outside, where the light was good, and the way of retreat clear, and to
have raked outwards to him, as far as he could reach, all that stuck to
the walls, including ropy slime and mouldy damp, but not one particle of
stalactite. It was, of course, seen that his specimens would not suit
Sir George; and the minister, in the extremity of the case, applied to
my uncles, though with some little unwillingness, as it was known that
no remuneration for their trouble could be offered to them. My uncles
were, however, delighted with the commission--it was all for the benefit
of science; and, providing themselves with torches and a hammer, they
set out for the caves. And I, of course, accompanied them--a very happy
boy--armed, like themselves, with hammer and torch, and prepared
devotedly to labour in behalf of science and Sir George.
I had never before seen the caves by torch-light; and though what I now
witnessed did not quite come up to what I had read regarding the Grotto
of Antiparos, or even the wonders of the Peak, it was unquestionably
both strange and fine. The celebrated Dropping Cave proved inferior--as
is not unfrequently the case with the celebrated--to a cave almost
entirely unknown, which opened among the rocks a little further to the
east; and yet even _it_ had its interest. It widened, as one entered,
into a twilight chamber, green with velvety mosses, that love the damp
and the shade; and terminated in a range of crystalline wells, fed by
the perpetual dropping, and hollowed in what seemed an altar-piece of
the deposited marble. And above, and along the sides, there depended
many a draped fold, and hung many a translucent icicle. The other cave,
however, we found to be of much greater extent, and of more varied
character. It is one of three caves of the old coast line, known as the
Doocot or Pigeon Caves, which open upon a piece of rocky beach, overhung
by a rudely semicircular range of gloomy precipices. The points of the
semicircle project on either side into deep water--into at least water
so much deeper than the fall of ordinary neaps, that it is only during
the ebb of stream tides that the place is accessible by land; and in
each of these bold promontories--the terminal horns of the
crescent--there is a cave of the present coast-line, deeply hollowed, in
which the sea stands from ten to twelve feet in depth when the tide is
at full, and in which the surf thunders, when gales blow hard from the
stormy north-east, with the roar of whole parks of artillery. The cave
in the western promontory, which bears among the townsfolk the name of
the "Puir Wife's Meal Kist," has its roof drilled by two small
perforations--the largest of them not a great deal wider than the
blow-hole of a porpoise--that open externally among the cliffs above;
and when, during storms from the sea, the huge waves come rolling ashore
like green moving walls, there are certain times of the tide in which
they shut up the mouth of the cave, and so compress the air within, that
it rushes upwards through the openings, roaring in its escape as if ten
whales were blowing at once, and rises from amid the crags overhead in
two white jets of vapour, distinctly visible, to the height of from
sixty to eighty feet. If there be critics who have deemed it one of the
extravagances of Goethe that he should have given life and motion, as in
his famous witch-scene in "Faust," to the Hartz crags, they would do
well to visit this bold headland during some winter tempest from the
east, and find his description perfectly sober and true:
"See the giant crags, oh ho!
How they snort and how they blow!"
Within, at the bottom of the crescent, and where the tide never reaches
when at the fullest, we found the large pigeon cave which we had come to
explore, hollowed for about a hundred and fifty feet in the line of a
fault. There runs across the opening the broken remains of a wall
erected by some monopolizing proprietor of the neighbouring lands, with
the intention of appropriating to himself the pigeons of the cavern; but
his day, even at this time, had been long gone by, and the wall had sunk
into a ruin. As we advanced, the cave caught the echoes of our
footsteps, and a flock of pigeons, startled from their nests, came
whizzing out, almost brushing us with their wings. The damp floor
sounded hollow to the tread; we saw the green mossy sides, which close
in the uncertain light, more than twenty feet overhead, furrowed by
ridges of stalactites, that became whiter and purer as they retired from
the vegetative influences; and marked that the last plant which appeared
as we wended our way inwards was a minute green moss, about half an inch
in length, which slanted outwards on the prominence of the sides, and
overlay myriads of similar sprigs of moss, long before converted into
stone, but which, faithful in death to the ruling law of their lives,
still pointed, like the others, to the free air and the light. And then,
in the deeper recesses of the cave, where the floor becomes covered with
uneven sheets of stalagmite, and where long spear-like icicles and
drapery-like foldings, pure as the marble of the sculptor, descend from
above, or hang pendent over the sides, we found in abundance magnificent
specimens for Sir George. The entire expedition was one of wondrous
interest; and I returned next day to school, big with description and
narrative, to excite, by truths more marvellous than fiction, the
curiosity of my class-fellows.
I had previously introduced them to the marvels of the hill; and during
our Saturday half-holidays, some of them had accompanied me in my
excursions to it. But it had failed, somehow, to catch their fancy. It
was too solitary, and too far from home, and, as a scene of amusement,
not at all equal to the town-links, where they could play at "shinty"
and "French and English," almost within _hail_ of their parents'
homesteads. The very tract along its flat, moory summit, over which,
according to tradition, Wallace had once driven before him in headlong
rout a strong body of English, and which was actually mottled with
sepulchral tumuli, still visible amid the heath, failed in any marked
degree to engage them; and though they liked well enough to hear about
the caves, they seemed to have no very great desire to see them. There
was, however, one little fellow, who sat in the Latin form--the member
of a class lower and brighter than the heavy one, though it was not
particularly bright either--who differed in this respect from all the
others. Though he was my junior by about a twelvemonth, and shorter by
about half a head, he was a diligent boy in even the Grammar School, in
which boys were so rarely diligent, and, for his years, a thoroughly
sensible one, without a grain of the dreamer in his composition. I
succeeded, however, notwithstanding his sobriety, in infecting him
thoroughly with my peculiar tastes, and learned to love him very much,
partly because he doubled my amusements by sharing in them, and partly,
I daresay--on the principle on which Mahomet preferred his old wife to
his young one--because "he believed in me." Devoted to him as Caliban in
the _Tempest_ to his friend Trinculo--
"I showed him the best springs, I plucked him berries.
And I with my long nails did dig him pig-nuts."
His curiosity on this occasion was largely excited by my description of
the Doocot Cave; and, setting out one morning to explore its wonders,
armed with John Feddes's hammer, in the benefits of which my friend was
permitted liberally to share, we failed, for that day at least, in
finding our way back.
It was on a pleasant spring morning that, with my little curious friend
beside me, I stood on the beach opposite the eastern promontory, that,
with its stern granitic wall, bars access for ten days out of every
fourteen to the wonders of the Doocot; and saw it stretching provokingly
out into the green water. It was hard to be disappointed, and the caves
so near. The tide was a low neap, and if we wanted a passage dry-shod,
it behoved us to wait for at least a week; but neither of us understood
the philosophy of neap-tides at the period. I was quite sure I had got
round at low water with my uncles not a great many days before, and we
both inferred, that if we but succeeded in getting round now, it would
be quite a pleasure to wait among the caves inside until such time as
the fall of the tide should lay bare a passage for our return. A narrow
and broken shelf runs along the promontory, on which, by the assistance
of the naked toe and the toe-nail, it is just possible to creep. We
succeeded in scrambling up to it; and then, crawling outwards on all
fours--the precipice, as we proceeded, beetling more and more formidable
from above, and the water becoming greener and deeper below--we reached
the outer point of the promontory; and then doubling the cape on a still
narrowing margin--the water, by a reverse process, becoming shallower
and less green as we advanced inwards--we found the ledge terminating
just where, after clearing the sea, it overhung the gravelly beach at an
elevation of nearly ten feet. Adown we both dropped, proud of our
success; up splashed the rattling gravel as we fell; and for at least
the whole coming week--though we were unaware of the extent of our good
luck at the time--the marvels of the Doocot Cave might be regarded as
solely and exclusively our own. For one short seven days--to borrow
emphasis from the phraseology of Carlyle--"they were our own, and no
other man's."
The first few hours were hours of sheer enjoyment The larger cave proved
a mine of marvels; and we found a great deal additional to wonder at on
the slopes beneath the precipices, and along the piece of rocky
sea-beach in front. We succeeded in discovering for ourselves, in
creeping, dwarf bushes, that told of the blighting influences of the
sea-spray; the pale yellow honeysuckle, that we had never seen before,
save in gardens and shrubberies; and on a deeply-shaded slope that
leaned against one of the steeper precipices, we detected the
sweet-scented woodroof of the flower-plot and parterre, with its pretty
verticillate leaves, that become the more odoriferous the more they are
crushed, and its white delicate flowers. There, too, immediately in the
opening of the deeper cave, where a small stream came pattering in
detached drops from the over-beetling precipice above, like the first
drops of a heavy thunder-shower, we found the hot, bitter scurvy grass,
with its minute cruciform flowers, which the great Captain Cook had
used in his voyages; above all, _there_ were the caves with their
pigeons--white, variegated, and blue--and their mysterious and gloomy
depths, in which plants hardened into stone, and water became marble. In
a short time we had broken off with our hammers whole pocketfuls of
stalactites and petrified moss. There were little pools at the side of
the cave, where we could see the work of congelation going on, as at the
commencement of an October frost, when the cold north wind ruffles, and
but barely ruffles, the surface of some mountain lochan or sluggish
moorland stream, and shows the newly-formed needles of ice projecting
mole-like from the shores into the water. So rapid was the course of
deposition, that there were cases in which the sides of the hollows
seemed growing almost in proportion as the water rose in them; the
springs, lipping over, deposited their minute crystals on the edges; and
the reservoirs deepened and became more capacious as their mounds were
built up by this curious masonry. The long telescopic prospect of the
sparkling sea, as viewed from the inner extremity of the cavern, while
all around was dark as midnight--the sudden gleam of the sea-gull, seen
for a moment from the recess, as it flitted past in the sunshine--the
black heaving bulk of the grampus, as it threw up its slender jets of
spray, and then, turning downwards, displayed its glossy back and vast
angular fin--even the pigeons, as they shot whizzing by, one moment
scarce visible in the gloom, the next radiant in the light--all acquired
a new interest, from the peculiarity of the _setting_ in which we saw
them. They formed a series of sun-gilt vignettes, framed in jet; and it
was long ere we tired of seeing and admiring in them much of the strange
and the beautiful. It did seem rather ominous, however, and perhaps
somewhat supernatural to boot, that about an hour after noon, the tide,
while there was yet a full fathom of water beneath the brow of the
promontory, ceased to fall, and then, after A quarter of an hour's
space, began actually to creep upwards on the beach. But just hoping
that there might be some mistake in the matter, which the evening tide
would scarce fail to rectify, we continued to amuse ourselves, and to
hope on. Hour after hour passed, lengthening as the shadows lengthened,
and yet the tide still rose. The sun had sunk behind the precipices, and
all was gloom along their bases, and double gloom in their caves; but
their rugged brows still caught the red glare of evening. The flush rose
higher and higher, chased by the shadows; and then, after lingering for
a moment on their crests of honeysuckle and juniper, passed away, and
the whole became sombre and grey. The sea-gull sprang upwards from where
he had floated on the ripple, and hied him slowly away to his lodge in
his deep-sea stack; the dusky cormorant flitted past, with heavier and
more frequent stroke, to his whitened shelf high on the precipice; the
pigeons came whizzing downwards from the uplands and the opposite land,
and disappeared amid the gloom of their caves; every creature that had
wings made use of them in speeding homewards; but neither my companion
nor myself had any; and there was no possibility of getting home without
them. We made desperate efforts to scale the precipices, and on two
several occasions succeeded in reaching mid-way shelves among the crags,
where the sparrowhawk and the raven build; but though we had climbed
well enough to render our return a matter of bare possibility, there was
no possibility whatever of getting farther up: the cliffs had never been
scaled before, and they were not destined to be scaled now. And so, as
the twilight deepened, and the precarious footing became every moment
more doubtful and precarious still, we had just to give up in despair.
"Wouldn't care for myself," said the poor little fellow, my companion,
bursting into tears, "if it were not for my mother; but what will my
mother say?" "Wouldn't care neither," said I, with a heavy heart; "but
it's just back water, and we'll get out at twall." We retreated together
into one of the shallower and drier caves, and, clearing a little spot
of its rough stones, and then groping along the rocks for the dry grass
that in the spring season hangs from them in withered tufts, we formed
for ourselves a most uncomfortable bed, and lay down in one another's
arms. For the last few hours mountainous piles of clouds had been rising
dark and stormy in the sea-mouth: they had flared portentously in the
setting sun, and had worn, with the decline of evening, almost every
meteoric tint of anger, from fiery red to a sombre thundrous brown, and
from sombre brown to doleful black. And we could now at least hear what
they portended, though we could no longer see. The rising wind began to
howl mournfully amid the cliffs, and the sea, hitherto so silent, to
beat heavily against the shore, and to boom, like distress-guns, from
the recesses of the two deep-sea caves. We could hear, too, the beating
rain, now heavier, now lighter, as the gusts swelled or sank; and the
intermittent patter of the streamlet over the deeper cave, now driving
against the precipices, now descending heavily on the stones.
My companion had only the real evils of the case to deal with, and so,
the hardness of our bed and the coldness of the night considered, he
slept tolerably well; but I was unlucky enough to have evils greatly
worse than the real ones to annoy me. The corpse of a drowned seaman had
been found on the beach about a month previous, some forty yards firm
where we lay. The hands and feet, miserably contracted, and corrugated
into deep folds at every joint, yet swollen to twice their proper size,
had been bleached as white as pieces of alumed sheep-skin; and where the
head should have been, there existed only a sad mass of rubbish. I had
examined the body, as young people are apt to do, a great deal too
curiously for my peace; and, though I had never done the poor nameless
seaman any harm, I could not have suffered more from him during that
melancholy night, had I been his murderer. Sleeping or waking, he was
continually before me. Every time I dropped into a doze, he would come
stalking up the beach from the spot where he had lain, with his stiff
white fingers, that stuck out like eagle's toes, and his pale, broken
pulp of a head, and attempt striking me; and then I would awaken with a
start, cling to my companion, and remember that the drowned sailor had
lain festering among the identical bunches of sea-weed that still rotted
on the beach not a stone-cast away. The near neighbourhood of a score of
living bandits would have inspired less horror than the recollection of
that one dead seaman.
Towards midnight the sky cleared and the wind fell, and the moon, in her
last quarter, rose red as a mass of heated iron out of the sea. We crept
down, in the uncertain light, over the rough slippery crags, to
ascertain whether the tide had not fallen sufficiently far to yield us a
passage; but we found the waves chafing among the rocks just where the
tide-line had rested twelve hours before, and a full fathom of sea
enclasping the base of the promontory. A glimmering idea of the real
nature of our situation at length crossed my mind. It was not
imprisonment for a tide to which we had consigned ourselves, it was
imprisonment for a week. There was little comfort in the thought,
arising, as it did, amid the chills and terrors of a dreary midnight;
and I looked wistfully on the sea as our only path of escape. There was
a vessel crossing the wake of the moon at the time, scarce half a mile
from the shore; and, assisted by my companion, I began to shout at the
top of my lungs, in the hope of being heard by the sailors. We saw her
dim bulk falling slowly athwart the red glittering belt of light that
had rendered her visible, and then disappearing in the murky blackness,
and just as we lost sight of her for ever, we could hear an indistinct
sound mingling with the dash of the waves--the shout, in reply, of the
startled helmsman. The vessel, as we afterwards learned, was a large
stone-lighter, deeply laden, and unfurnished with a boat; nor were her
crew at all sure that it would have been safe to attend to the midnight
voice from amid the rocks, even had they had the means of communication
with the shore. We waited on and on, however, now shouting by turns, and
now shouting together; but there was no second reply; and at length,
losing hope, we groped our way back to our comfortless bed, just as the
tide had again turned on the beach, and the waves began to roll upwards
higher and higher at every dash.
As the moon rose and brightened, the dead seaman became less
troublesome; and I had succeeded in dropping as soundly asleep as my
companion, when we were both aroused by a loud shout. We started up and
again crept downwards among the crags to the shore; and as we reached
the sea the shout was repeated. It was that of at least a dozen harsh
voices united. There was a brief pause, followed by another shout; and
then two boats, strongly manned, shot round the western promontory, and
the men, resting on their oars, turned towards the rock, and shouted yet
again. The whole town had been alarmed by the intelligence that two
little boys had straggled away in the morning to the rocks of the
southern Sutor, and had not found their way back. The precipices had
been a scene of frightful accidents from time immemorial, and it was at
once inferred that one other sad accident had been added to the number.
True, there were cases remembered of people having been tide-bound in
the Doocot Caves, and not much the worse in consequence; but as the
caves were inaccessible during neaps, we could not, it was said,
possibly be in them; and the sole remaining ground of hope was, that, as
had happened once before, only one of the two had been killed, and that
the survivor was lingering among the rocks, afraid to come home. And in
this belief, when the moon rose and the surf fell, the two boats had
been fitted out. It was late in the morning ere we reached Cromarty, but
a crowd on the beach awaited our arrival; and there were anxious-looking
lights glancing in the windows, thick and manifold; nay, such was the
interest elicited, that some enormously bad verses, in which the writer
described the incident a few days after, became popular enough to be
handed about in manuscript, and read at tea-parties by the _elite_ of
the town. Poor old Miss Bond, who kept the town boarding-school, got the
piece nicely dressed up, somewhat on the principle upon which Macpherson
translated Ossian; and at our first school-examination--proud and happy
day for the author!--it was recited with vast applause, by one of her
prettiest young ladies, before the assembled taste and fashion of
Cromarty.
FOOTNOTE:
[3]
"The beautiful blue damsel flies,
That fluttered round the jasmine steins,
Like winged flowers or flying gems."
PARADISE AND THE PEEL.