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 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