The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles

(1854)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."

* * * * *

"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 anoutside city lot; imagine some of them magnified into mountains, andthe vacant lot the sea; and you will have a fit idea of the generalaspect of the Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles. A group rather of extinctvolcanoes than of isles; looking much as the world at large might, aftera 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, oldcities 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 timesinspire, does not fail to touch in the pilgrim some of his lessunpleasurable feelings.

And as for solitariness; the great forests of the north, the expanses ofunnavigated waters, the Greenland ice-fields, are the profoundest ofsolitudes to a human observer; still the magic of their changeable tidesand seasons mitigates their terror; because, though unvisited by men,those forests are visited by the May; the remotest seas reflect familiarstars 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 whichexalts them in desolation above Idumea and the Pole, is, that to themchange never comes; neither the change of seasons nor of sorrows. Cut bythe Equator, they know not autumn, and they know not spring; whilealready reduced to the lees of fire, ruin itself can work little moreupon them. The showers refresh the deserts; but in these isles, rainnever falls. Like split Syrian gourds left withering in the sun, theyare cracked by an everlasting drought beneath a torrid sky. "Have mercyupon me," the wailing spirit of the Encantadas seems to cry, "and sendLazarus that he may dip the tip of his finger in water and cool mytongue, for I am tormented in this flame."