concealed from view, or is imperfectly exposed, until we nearly approach
it, the immense rock which is perforated being here dressed with the
thick foliage of the spruce-pine, and the harsh surface adorned with a
beautiful tracery of vines and creepers. At last is seen the entrance of
what appears to be a huge subterraneous cavern or grotto, into which the
stream disappears; a towering rock rising here about two hundred feet
above the surface of the stream, and a rude entrance gouged into it,
varying in width, as far as the eye can reach, from one hundred to one
hundred and fifty feet, and rising in a clear vault from seventy to
eighty feet above the floor. The view here terminates in the very
blackness of darkness; it is broken on the first curve of the tunnel.
The bed of the stream, from which the water has disappeared on account
of the drouth, the reduced currents sinking to lower subterranean
channels, is piled with great irregular rocks, on the sharp points of
which we stumble and cut our hands: there is no foothold but on rocks,
and it is only when we have struggled through the awful, cruel darkness,
holding up some feeble lights in it, and issued into the broad sunshine,
that we find we have travelled nearly two hundred yards (or say, more
exactly, five hundred feet) through one solid rock, in which there is
not an inch of soil, not a seam, not a cleft, and which, even beyond the
debouchure of the tunnel, yet runs away a hundred yards in a wall five
hundred feet high, as clean and whetted as the work of the mason.
But we must not anticipate this majestical scene, "wonderful beyond all
wondrous measure." Happily, in entering the tunnel from the western side
we have adopted the course of exploration which affords a gradual ascent
of the emotions, until at last they tower to the standard of a perfect
sublimity. The course of the tunnel may be described as a continuous
curve: it resembles, indeed, a prostrate S. For a distance of twenty
yards midway of this course we are excluded from a view of either
entrance, and the darkness is about that of a night with one quarter
of the moon. The vault becomes lower here--in some places scarcely
more than thirty feet high--and springs immediately from the floor.
The situation is awful and oppressive: the voice sounds unnatural,
and rumbles strangely and fearfully along the arch of stone. We are
encoffined in the solid rock: there is a strange pang in the beating
heart in its imprisonment, so _impenetrable_, black, hopeless, and we
hurry to meet the light of day. In that light we are disentombed: we
cast off the confinements of the black space through which we have
passed, and we are instantly introduced to a scene so luminous and
majestic that in a moment our trembling eyes are captivated and our
hearts lifted in unutterable worship of the Creator's works.
It is that sheer wall of rock which we have already mentioned, where the
arch and other side of the tunnel break away into the mountain slope; a
high wall, slightly impending; an amphitheatre, extending one hundred
yards, of awful precipices; a clean battlement, without a joint in it,
five hundred feet high. And this splendid height and breadth of stone,
that a thousand storms have polished, leaving not a cleft of soil in
it,--this huge, unjointed masonry raised against the sky, gray and
weather-stained, with glittering patches of light on it,--is yet part of
the same huge rock which towered at the farther end of the tunnel, and
through whose seamless cavity we have travelled two hundred yards. It is
in this view that the mystery of the scene seizes the mind, and the last
element of sublimity is added to it. It is in this view that the Natural
Tunnel we had come to see as a mere "curiosity" takes rank among the
greatest wonders of the world. What power, what possible imaginable
agency of nature, could have worked out this stupendous scene?...
Turning our eyes away from the battlement of rock to the opposite side
of the ravine, a new revelation of the grand and picturesque awaits us.
Here a gigantic cliff, but one broken with rock and soil, and threaded
to its summit by a sapling growth of the buckeye, the linden, and the
pine, rises almost perpendicularly from the water's edge to a height
almost equal to that of the opposite wall of rock. A natural platform
is seen to project over it, and yet a few yards farther there is an
insulated cliff, a cyclopean _chimney_, so to speak, scarcely more than
a foot square at its top, rising in the form of a turret at least sixty
feet above its basement, which is a portion of the imposing cliff we
have mentioned. It is at once perceived that here are two points of view
that will give us new and perhaps the most imposing aspects of the
scene. To attain these points, however, it is necessary to make a
circuit of half a mile; and the sinking sun admonishes us to defer this
new interest of the scene until to-morrow....
We remounted for the tunnel in the early morning, and were soon to find
that the rising sun was to give a new and unexpected glory to the scene.
This time we ascend the mountain instead of deflecting as before. The
road is easy; there are no difficulties of access to the points of view
from the top of the tunnel, and they are undoubtedly the grandest. We
pass to the platform before described by a few steps from the main road.
It is a slab of rock projecting from an open patch of ground; a dead
cedar-tree is standing at its edge, throwing its gnarled and twisted
arms, as in wild and widowed sorrow, over the awful scene below. We now
see the great opposite amphitheatre of rock in added grandeur, for we
see it from above,--we see it across a chasm nine hundred feet wide and
five hundred feet deep, and the exposure being almost exactly eastern,
the long spears of the rising sun are being shattered on it. The effect
is inexpressibly grand. But there is one more circumstance to be added
to the scene; we do not see from this observatory the arch, the entrance
of the tunnel. A few yards farther the fearful chimney-shaped rock
invites to a more commanding view, but the ascent is dangerous; the
stone on top is loose, and so narrow that two persons can scarcely stand
on it. A single misstep, a moment's loss of balance, and we would fall
into eternity. But now the sense of peril is lost, or is rather mingled,
in the grandeur of the scene. It is a panoramic view. We have now the
whole sweep of the mural precipice opposite; the sun's glitter is
incessant on the polished stone; the trees which fringe the bottom
appear now scarcely more than shrubs; the entrance of the tunnel has now
come into view, and that which yesterday we thought so high and wide,
now appears, from our amazing height, as a stooped door-way. We imagine
the gloomy entrance into a cave of Erebus and Death, the broken rocks
lying within which look like black and mangled entrails. It is a fearful
picture,--it is that of a supernatural abode.
[This marvel of nature is not without its tradition,--one of
Indian origin,--in which is repeated, with suitable variations,
the familiar Lover's Leap narrative. A more prosaic and modern
interest attaches to it, in its having been chosen as the route
of a railroad, nature's contribution of a passage through a
difficult mountain wall.]
PLANTATION LIFE IN WAR TIMES.
WILLIAM HOWARD RUSSELL.
[Russell, of former celebrity as war correspondent of _The
Times_, visited the seceded States during the early period of
the American Civil War. His letters thence, published later as
"Pictures of Southern Life," are full of graphic descriptions
of scenes and feelings in the Confederate States during the era
of enthusiasm and hopefulness, before the war had borne its
harvest of doubt and misery. It is not our purpose, however, to
give his experiences in this special field. It is travel, not
war, with which we are concerned, and we confine ourself to an
account of a visit to a plantation in the vicinity of
Charleston. A short preliminary sketch of the ebb and flow of
rumor in war times, however, may be of interest.]
The rolling fire of the revolution is fast sweeping over the prairie,
and one must fly before it or burn. I am obliged to see all that can be
seen of the South at once, and then, armed with such safeguards as I can
procure, to make an effort to recover my communications. Bridges broken,
rails torn up, telegraphs pulled down,--I am quite in the air, and air
charged with powder and fire. One of the most extraordinary books in the
world could be made out of the cuttings and parings of the newspapers
which have been published within the last few days. The judgments,
statements, asseverations of the press, everywhere necessarily hasty,
ill-sifted, and off-hand, do not aspire to even an ephemeral existence
here. They are of use if they serve the purpose of the moment, and of
the little boys who commence their childhood in deceit, and continue to
adolescence in iniquity, by giving vocal utterance to the "sensation"
headings of the journals they retail so sharply and so curtly.
Talk of the superstition of the Middle Ages, or of the credulity of the
more advanced period of rural life; laugh at the Holy Coat of Treves, or
groan over the Lady of Salette; deplore the faith in winking pictures,
or in a _communique_ of the _Moniteur_; moralize on the superstition
which discovers more in the liquefaction of the ichor of St. Gennaro
than a chemical trick; but if you desire to understand how far faith can
see and trust among the people who consider themselves the most
civilized and intelligent in the world, you will study the American
journals, and read the telegrams which appear in them.
One day the Seventh New York Regiment is destroyed for the edification
of the South, and is cut up into such small pieces that none of it is
ever seen afterwards. The next day it marches into Washington or
Annapolis, all the better for the process. Another, in order to
encourage the North, it is said that hecatombs of dead were carried
out of Fort Moultrie, packed up, for easy travelling, in boxes. Again,
to irritate both, it is credibly stated that Lord Lyons is going to
interfere, or that an Anglo-French fleet is coming to watch the ports;
and so on, through a wild play of fancy, inexact in line, as though the
batteries were charged with the aurora borealis or summer lightning,
instead of the respectable, steady, manageable offspring of acid and
metal....
I am now, however, dealing with South Carolina, which has been the _fons
et origo_ of the secession doctrines and their development into the full
life of the Confederate States. The whole foundation on which South
Carolina rests is cotton and a certain amount of rice; or rather she
bases her whole fabric on the necessity which exists in Europe for those
products of her soil, believing and asserting, as she does, that England
and France cannot and will not do without them. Cotton, without a
market, is so much flocculent matter encumbering the ground. Rice,
without demand for it, is unsalable grain in store and on the field.
Cotton at ten cents a pound is boundless prosperity, empire, and
superiority, and rice and grain need no longer be regarded.
In the matter of slave labor, South Carolina argues pretty much in this
way: England and France require our products. In order to meet their
wants we must cultivate our soil. There is only one way of doing so. The
white man cannot live on our land at certain seasons of the year; he
cannot work in the manner required by the crops. He must, therefore,
employ a race suited to the labor, and that is a race which will only
work when it is obliged to do so.
[And so on throughout the old argument, which, fortunately, the
logic of time has in great measure disproved. But, leaving this
phase of the subject, we shall accompany our traveller on a
visit to the land of rice and slave labor.]
Early one morning I started in a steamer to visit a plantation in the
Pedee and Maccamaw district, in the island coast of the State, north of
Charleston. Passing Sumter, on which men are busily engaged, under the
Confederate flag, in making good damages and mounting guns, we put out a
few miles to sea, and with the low sandy shore, dotted with soldiers and
guard-houses and clumps of trees, on our left, in a few hours pass the
Santee River, and enter an estuary into which the Pedee and Maccamaw run
a few miles farther to the northwest.
The steamer ran alongside a jetty and pier, which was crowded by men in
uniform, waiting for the news and for supplies of creature comforts.
Ladies were cantering along the fine hard beach, and some gigs and
tax-carts, fully laden, rolled along very much as one sees them at
Scarborough. The soldiers on the pier were all gentlemen of the county.
Some, dressed in gray tunics and yellow facings, in high felt-hats and
plumes and jack-boots, would have done no discredit in face, figure,
and bearing to the gayest cavaliers who ever thundered at the heels of
Prince Rupert. Their horses, full of Carolinian fire and mettle, stood
picketed under the trees along the margin of the beach. Among these men,
who had been doing the duty of common troopers in patrolling the
sea-coast, were gentlemen possessed of large estates and princely
fortunes; and one who stood among them was pointed out to me as captain
of a company, for whose use his liberality provided unbounded daily
libations of champagne, and the best luxuries which French ingenuity can
safely imprison in those well-known caskets with which Crimean warriors
were not unacquainted at the close of the campaign.
They were eager for news, which was shouted out to them by their friends
in the steamer, and one was struck by the intimate personal cordiality
and familiar acquaintance which existed among them. Three heavy guns,
mounted in an earthwork defended by palisades, covered the beach and
the landing-place, and the garrison was to have been reinforced by a
regiment from Charleston, which, however, had not got in readiness to
go up on our steamer, owing to some little difficulties between the
volunteers, their officers, and the quartermaster-general's department.
As the "Nina" approaches the tumble-down wharf, two or three citizens
advance from the shade of shaky sheds to welcome us, and a few country
vehicles and light phaetons are drawn forth from the same shelter to
receive the passengers, while the negro boys and girls who have been
playing upon the bales of cotton and barrels of rice, which represent
the trade of the place on the wharf, take up commanding positions for
the better observation of our proceedings. There is an air of quaint
simplicity and old-fashioned quiet about Georgetown, refreshingly
antagonistic to the bustle and tumult of most American cities. While
waiting for our vehicle we enjoyed the hospitality of one of our
friends, who took us into an old-fashioned angular wooden mansion, more
than a century old, still sound in every timber, and testifying in its
quaint wainscotings, and the rigid framework of door and window, to the
durability of its cypress timbers and the preservative character of the
atmosphere. In early days it was the crack house of the old settlement,
and the residence of the founder of the female branch of the family of
our host, who now only makes it his halting-place when passing to and
fro between Charleston and his plantation, leaving it the year round in
charge of an old servant and her grandchild. Rose-trees and flowering
shrubs clustered before the porch and filled the garden in front, and
the establishment gave me a good idea of a London merchant's retreat
about Chelsea a hundred and fifty years ago.
At length we were ready for our journey, and, mounted in two light
covered vehicles, proceeded along the sandy track, which, after a while,
led us to a deep cut in the bosom of the woods, where silence was only
broken by the cry of a woodpecker, the boom of a crane, or the sharp
challenge of the jay. For miles we passed through the shadow of this
forest, meeting only two or three vehicles, containing female planterdom
on little excursions of pleasure or business, who smiled their welcome
as we passed. Arrived at a deep chocolate-colored stream, called Black
River, full of fish and alligators, we find a flat large enough to
accommodate vehicles and passengers, and propelled by two negroes
pulling upon a stretched rope, in the manner usual in the ferry-boats
of Switzerland, ready for our reception.
Another drive through a more open country, and we reach a fine grove
of pine and live-oak, which melts away into a shrubbery, guarded by a
rustic gate-way, passing through which, we are brought by a sudden turn
into the planter's house, buried in trees, which dispute with the
greensward and with wild flower-beds every yard of the space which lies
between the hall-door and the waters of the Pedee; and in a few minutes,
as we gaze over the expanse of fields just tinged with green by the
first life of the early rice crops, marked by the deep water cuts, and
bounded by a fringe of unceasing forest, the chimneys of the steamer we
had left at Georgetown gliding as it were through the fields indicate
the existence of another navigable river still beyond.
Leaving with regret the veranda which commanded so charming a
foreground, we enter the house, and are reminded by its low-browed,
old-fashioned rooms, of the country houses yet to be found in parts of
Ireland or on the Scottish border, with additions, made by the luxury
and love of foreign travel, of more than one generation of educated
Southern planters. Paintings from Italy illustrate the walls, in
juxtaposition with interesting portraits of early colonial governors and
their lovely womankind, limned with no uncertain hand, and full of the
vigor of touch and naturalness of drapery of which Copley has left us
too few exemplars; and one portrait of Benjamin West claims for itself
such honor as his own pencil can give. An excellent library--filled with
collections of French and English classics, and with those ponderous
editions of Voltaire, Rousseau, the _memoires pour servir_, books of
travel and history such as delighted our forefathers in the last
century, and many works of American and general history--affords ample
occupation for a rainy day.
But, alas! these, and all things good which else the house affords, can
be enjoyed but for a brief season. Just as nature has expanded every
charm, developed every grace, and clothed the scene with all the beauty
of opened flower, of ripening grain, and of mature vegetation, on the
wings of the wind the poisoned breath comes, borne to the home of the
white man, and he must fly before it or perish. The books lie unopened
on their shelves, the flower blooms and dies unheeded, and, pity 'tis
true, the old Madeira garnered 'neath the roof settles down for a fresh
lease of life, and sets about its solitary task of acquiring a finer
flavor for the infrequent lips of its banished master and his welcome
visitors. This is the story, at least, that we hear on all sides, and
such is the tale repeated to us beneath the porch, when the moon
enhances while softening the loveliness of the scene, and the rich
melody of mocking-birds fills the grove.
Within these hospitable doors Horace might banquet better than he did
with Nasidienus, and drink such wine as can only be found among the
descendants of the ancestry who, improvident enough in all else, learnt
the wisdom of bottling up choice old Bual and Sercial ere the demon of
oidium had dried up their generous sources forever. To these must be
added excellent bread, ingenious varieties of the _galette_, compounded
now of rice and now of Indian meal, delicious butter and fruits, all
good of their kind. And is there anything bitter rising up from the
bottom of the social bowl? My black friends who attend on me are grave
as Mussulman Khitmutgars. They are attired in liveries, and wear white
cravats and Berlin gloves. At night when we retire, off they go to their
outer darkness in the small settlement of negrohood, which is separated
from our house by a wooden palisade. Their fidelity is undoubted. The
house breathes an air of security. The doors and windows are unlocked.
There is but one gun, a fowling-piece, on the premises. No planter
hereabouts has any dread of his slaves. But I have seen, within the
short time I have been in this part of the world, several dreadful
accounts of murder and violence, in which masters suffered at the hands
of their slaves. There is something suspicious in the constant,
never-ending statement that "we are not afraid of our slaves."
The curfew and the night patrol in the streets, the prisons and
watch-houses, and the police regulations, prove that strict supervision,
at all events, is needed and necessary. My host is a kind man and a good
master. If slaves are happy anywhere, they should be so with him.
These people are fed by their master. They have upward of half a pound
per diem of fat pork, and corn in abundance. They rear poultry and sell
their chickens and eggs to the house. They are clothed by their master.
He keeps them in sickness as in health. Now and then there are gifts of
tobacco and molasses for the deserving. There was little labor going on
in the fields, for the rice has been just exerting itself to get its
head above water. These fields yield plentifully; for the waters of the
river are fat, and they are let in whenever the planter requires it, by
means of floodgates and small canals, through which the flats can carry
their loads of grain to the river for loading the steamers.
[Following our traveller in his peregrinations through the
South, we next take him up on a sugar plantation on the
Mississippi. The part of his journey in which we now find him
is to be taken by boat.]
Charon pushed his skiff into the water--there was a good deal of rain in
it--in shape of snuffer-dish, some ten feet long and a foot deep. I got
in, and the conscious waters immediately began vigorously spurting
through the cotton wadding wherewith the craft was calked. Had we got
out into the stream we should have had a swim for it, and they do say
the Mississippi is the most dangerous river for that healthful exercise
in the known world.
"Why! deuce take you" (I said at least that, in my wrath), "don't you
see the boat is leaky?"
"See it now for true, massa. Nobody able to tell dat till massa get in,
tho'."
Another skiff proved to be stanch. I bade good-by to my friend, and sat
down in my boat, which was soon forced along up-stream close to the
bank, in order to get a good start across to the other side. The view,
from my lonely position, was curious, but not at all picturesque. The
landscape had disappeared at once. The world was bounded on both sides
by a high bank, and was constituted by a broad river,--just as if one
were sailing down an open sewer of enormous length and breadth. Above
the bank rose, however, the tops of tall trees and the chimneys of
sugar-houses. A row of a quarter of an hour brought us to the levee on
the other side. I ascended the bank, and directly in front of me, across
the road, appeared a carriage gate-way and wickets of wood, painted
white, in a line of park palings of the same material, which extended up
and down the road far as the eye could follow, and guarded wide-spread
fields of maize and sugar-cane. An avenue of trees, with branches close
set, drooping and overarching a walk paved with red brick, led to the
house, the porch of which was just visible at the extremity of the lawn,
with clustering flowers, rose, jasmine, and creepers clinging to the
pillars supporting the veranda.
The proprietor, who had espied my approach, issued forth with a section
of sable attendants in his rear, and gave me a hearty welcome. The house
was larger and better than the residences even of the richest planters,
though it was in need of some little repair, and had been built perhaps
fifty years ago, in the old Irish fashion, who built well, ate well,
drank well, and, finally, paid very well. The view from the belvedere
was one of the most striking of its kind in the world. If an English
agriculturist could see six thousand acres of the finest land in one
field, unbroken by hedge or boundary, and covered with the most
magnificent crops of tasselling Indian corn and sprouting sugar-cane,
as level as a billiard-table, he would surely doubt his senses. But here
is literally such a sight. Six thousand acres, better tilled than the
finest patch in all the Lothians, green as Meath pastures, which can be
cultivated for a hundred years to come without requiring manure, of
depth practically unlimited, and yielding an annual profit on what is
sold off it of at least twenty pounds an acre at the old prices and
usual yield of sugar. Rising up in the midst of the verdure are the
white lines of the negro cottages and the plantation offices and
sugar-houses, which look like large public edifices in the distance. And
who is the lord of all this fair domain? The proprietor of Houmas and
Orange grove is a man, a self-made one, who has attained his apogee on
the bright side of half a century, after twenty-five years of successful
business.