Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 377, March 1847Various
General
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 377, March 1847
Various
England -- Periodicals; Scotland -- Periodicals
As we reached what seemed to be the top of the rock, we came suddenly
into an open place, but so surrounded by trees and shrubs, as
effectually to shut in the view. Here was the cave; and very different
it was from what we had expected to find it! We had prepared ourselves
to explore a small Antiparos, and were quite chagrined to find our
grotto diminished to a mere den or covert, between two immense stones of
a truly Stonehengian appearance and juxtaposition. I doubted for a
moment whether their singular situation, on the top of this mountain,
were matter for the geologist or the antiquary; and would like to refer
the question to the learned Dean of Westminster, who hammers stones as
eloquently as some of his predecessors have hammered pulpits. The stones
are well-nigh equal in height, of about twenty feet perpendicular, one
of them nearly conical, and the other almost a true parallelopiped.
Betwixt them another large stone appears to have fallen, till it became
wedged; and the very small aperture between this stone and the ground
beneath, is all that justifies the name of a cave, though there are
several fissures about the stones, in which possibly beasts might be
sheltered, but hardly human beings. To render the cave itself large
enough for the pair that once inhabited it, the earth must have been dug
from under the stone, so as to make a covered pit; and even then, it was
hardly so good a place as is said to have been made for "a refuge to the
conies," being much fitter for wild-cats or tigers. I could scarcely
persuade myself, that English law could ever have driven a man three
thousand miles over the sea, and then into such a burrow as this! But so
it was; and it was retribution and justice too.
Bad as it was, it looked more agreeable Goffe and Whalley, than a
cross-beam and two halters, or even than apartments in the Tower of
London. They had it fitted up with a bed, and other "creature-comforts"
of a truly Crusoe-like description. The mouth of the cave was screened
by a thick growth of bushes, and the place was in several other respects
well suited to their purposes. The parallelopiped, of which I have
spoken, was easily climbed, being furnished with something like stairs,
and its top commands a fine view of the town, the bay, and the country
for miles around. It served them, therefore, as a watch-tower, and must
have been very useful as a means of protection, and as an observatory
for amusement. I mounted the stone myself, and tried to fancy how
different was the scene two hundred years ago. There the exile would sit
hour after hour, not as one may sit there now, to see sails and steamers
entering and leaving the harbour, and post-coaches and railroad cars
passing and re-passing continually; but to gaze in astonishment and
fear, if one lone ship might be descried coming up the bay, or if a
solitary horseman was to be seen or heard pursuing his journey in the
valley below.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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