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- 5894
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T07:57:55.413Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 5819
- text
- 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 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.”
Another feature in these isles is their emphatic uninhabitableness. It
is deemed a fit type of all-forsaken overthrow, that the jackal should
den in the wastes of weedy Babylon; but the Encantadas refuse to harbor
even the outcasts of the beasts. Man and wolf alike disown them. Little
but reptile life is here found: tortoises, lizards, immense spiders,
snakes, and that strangest anomaly of outlandish nature, the _aguano_.
No voice, no low, no howl is heard; the chief sound of life here is a
hiss.
On most of the isles where vegetation is found at all, it is more
ungrateful than the blankness of Aracama. Tangled thickets of wiry
bushes, without fruit and without a name, springing up among deep
fissures of calcined rock, and treacherously masking them; or a parched
growth of distorted cactus trees.
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- Chunk 1