THE ENCANTADAS; OR, ENCHANTED ISLES

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SKETCH FIRST.

THE ISLES AT LARGE.

  —­“That may not be, said then the ferryman,
  Least we unweeting hap to be fordonne;
  For those same islands seeming now and than,
  Are not firme land, nor any certein wonne,
  But stragling plots which to and fro do ronne
  In the wide waters; therefore are they hight
  The Wandering Islands; therefore do them shonne;
  For they have oft drawne many a wandring wight
  Into most deadly daunger and distressed plight;
  For whosoever once hath fastened
  His foot thereon may never it secure
  But wandreth evermore uncertein and unsure.”

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  “Darke, dolefull, dreary, like a greedy grave,
  That still for carrion carcasses doth crave;
  On top whereof ay dwelt the ghastly owl,
  Shrieking his balefull note, which ever drave
  Far from that haunt all other cheerful fowl,
  And all about it wandring ghosts did wayle and howl.”

Take five-and-twenty heaps of cinders dumped here and there in an outside city lot; imagine some of them magnified into mountains, and the vacant lot the sea; and you will have a fit idea of the general aspect of the Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles.  A group rather of extinct volcanoes than of isles; looking much as the world at large might, after a penal conflagration.

It is to be doubted whether any spot of earth can, in desolateness, furnish a parallel to this group.  Abandoned cemeteries of long ago, old cities by piecemeal tumbling to their ruin, these are melancholy enough; but, like all else which has but once been associated with humanity, they still awaken in us some thoughts of sympathy, however sad.  Hence, even the Dead Sea, along with whatever other emotions it may at times inspire, does not fail to touch in the pilgrim some of his less unpleasurable feelings.

And as for solitariness; the great forests of the north, the expanses of unnavigated waters, the Greenland ice-fields, are the profoundest of solitudes to a human observer; still the magic of their changeable tides and seasons mitigates their terror; because, though unvisited by men, those forests are visited by the May; the remotest seas reflect familiar stars even as Lake Erie does; and in the clear air of a fine Polar day, the irradiated, azure ice shows beautifully as malachite.

But the special curse, as one may call it, of the Encantadas, that which exalts them in desolation above Idumea and the Pole, is, that to them change never comes; neither the change of seasons nor of sorrows.  Cut by the Equator, they know not autumn, and they know not spring; while already reduced to the lees of fire, ruin itself can work little more upon them.  The showers refresh the deserts; but in these isles, rain never falls.  Like split Syrian gourds left withering in the sun, they are cracked by an everlasting drought beneath a torrid sky.  “Have mercy upon me,” the wailing spirit of the Encantadas seems to cry, “and send Lazarus that he may dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, for I am tormented in this flame.”