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- pouches suspended thereto, give them the most lugubrious expression. A
pensive race, they stand for hours together without motion. Their dull,
ashy plumage imparts an aspect as if they had been powdered over with
cinders. A penitential bird, indeed, fitly haunting the shores of the
clinkered Encantadas, whereon tormented Job himself might have well sat
down and scraped himself with potsherds.
Higher up now we mark the gony, or gray albatross, anomalously so
called, an unsightly unpoetic bird, unlike its storied kinsman, which
is the snow-white ghost of the haunted Capes of Hope and Horn.
As we still ascend from shelf to shelf, we find the tenants of the
tower serially disposed in order of their magnitude:—gannets, black and
speckled haglets, jays, sea-hens, sperm-whale-birds, gulls of all
varieties:—thrones, princedoms, powers, dominating one above another in
senatorial array; while, sprinkled over all, like an ever-repeated fly
in a great piece of broidery, the stormy petrel or Mother Cary’s
chicken sounds his continual challenge and alarm. That this mysterious
hummingbird of ocean—which, had it but brilliancy of hue, might, from
its evanescent liveliness, be almost called its butterfly, yet whose
chirrup under the stern is ominous to mariners as to the peasant the
death-tick sounding from behind the chimney jamb—should have its
special haunt at the Encantadas, contributes, in the seaman’s mind, not
a little to their dreary spell.
As day advances the dissonant din augments. With ear-splitting cries
the wild birds celebrate their matins. Each moment, flights push from
the tower, and join the aerial choir hovering overhead, while their
places below are supplied by darting myriads. But down through all this
discord of commotion, I hear clear, silver, bugle-like notes unbrokenly
falling, like oblique lines of swift-slanting rain in a cascading
shower. I gaze far up, and behold a snow-white angelic thing, with one
long, lance-like feather thrust out behind. It is the bright,
inspiriting chanticleer of ocean, the beauteous bird, from its
bestirring whistle of musical invocation, fitly styled the “Boatswain’s
Mate.”
The winged, life-clouding Rodondo had its full counterpart in the finny
hosts which peopled the waters at its base. Below the water-line, the
rock seemed one honey-comb of grottoes, affording labyrinthine
lurking-places for swarms of fairy fish. All were strange; many
exceedingly beautiful; and would have well graced the costliest glass
globes in which gold-fish are kept for a show. Nothing was more
striking than the complete novelty of many individuals of this
multitude. Here hues were seen as yet unpainted, and figures which are
unengraved.
To show the multitude, avidity, and nameless fearlessness and tameness
of these fish, let me say, that often, marking through clear spaces of
water—temporarily made so by the concentric dartings of the fish above
the surface—certain larger and less unwary wights, which swam slow and
deep; our anglers would cautiously essay to drop their lines down to
these last. But in vain; there was no passing the uppermost zone. No
sooner did the hook touch the sea, than a hundred infatuates contended
for the honor of capture. Poor fish of Rodondo! in your victimized
confidence, you are of the number of those who inconsiderately trust,
while they do not understand, human nature.
But the dawn is now fairly day. Band after band, the sea-fowl sail away
to forage the deep for their food. The tower is left solitary save the
fish-caves at its base. Its birdlime gleams in the golden rays like the
whitewash of a tall light-house, or the lofty sails of a cruiser. This
moment, doubtless, while we know it to be a dead desert rock other
voyagers are taking oaths it is a glad populous ship.
But ropes now, and let us ascend. Yet soft, this is not so easy.
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