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stupidity or their resolution was so great that they never went aside for
any impediment. One ceased his movements altogether just before the
mid-watch. At sunrise I found him butted like a battering ram against the
immovable foot of the foremast, and still striving, tooth and nail, to
force the impossible passage. That these tortoises are the victims of a
penal, or malignant, or perhaps a downright diabolical, enchanter, seems in
nothing more likely than in that strange infatuation of hopeless toil which
so often possesses them. I have known them in their journeyings ram
themselves heroically against rocks, and long abide there, nudging,
wriggling, wedging, in order to displace them, and so hold on their
inflexible path. Their crowning curse is their drudging impulse to
straightforwardness in a belittered world.

Meeting with no such hindrance as their companion did, the other tortoises
merely fell foul of small stumbling blocks -- buckets, blocks, and coils of
rigging -- and at times in the act of crawling over them would slip with an
astounding rattle to the deck. Listening to these draggings and
concussions, I thought me of the haunt from which they came: an isle full
of metallic ravines and gulches, sunk bottomlessly into the hearts of
splintered mountains, and covered for many miles with inextricable
thickets. I then pictured these three straightforward monsters, century
after century, writhing through the shades, grim as blacksmiths; crawling
so slowly and ponderously that not only did toadstools and all fungus
things grow beneath their feet, but a sooty moss sprouted upon their backs.
With them I lost myself in volcanic mazes, brushed away endless boughs of
rotting thickets, till finally in a dream I found myself sitting
cross-legged upon the foremost, a Brahmin similarly mounted upon either
side, forming a tripod of foreheads which upheld the universal cope.

Such was the wild nightmare begot by my first impression of the Encantadas
tortoise. But next evening, strange to say, I sat down with my shipmates
and made a merry repast from tortoise steaks and tortoise stews; and,
supper over, out knife, and helped convert the three mighty concave shells
into three fanciful soup tureens, and polished the three flat yellowish
calipees into three gorgeous salvers.
  ------------------------------------------------------------------------
                                Sketch Third
                                Rock Rodondo

"For they this hight the Rock of vile Reproach,
A dangerous and dreadful place,
To which nor fish nor fowl did once approach,
But yelling meaws with sea-gulls hoars and bace
And cormoyrants with birds of ravenous race,
Which still sit waiting on that dreadful clift."

"With that the rolling sea resounding soft
In his big base them fitly answered,
And on the Rock, the waves breaking aloft,
A solemn meane unto them measured."

"Then he the boteman bad row easily,
And let him heare some part of that rare melody."

"Suddeinly an innumerable flight
Of harmefull fowles about them fluttering cride, And with their wicked
wings them oft did smight
And sore annoyed, groping in that griesly night."

"Even all the nation of unfortunate
And fatal birds about them flocked were."

To go up into a high stone tower is not only a very fine thing in itself,
but the very best mode of gaining a comprehensive view of the region round
about. It is all the better if this tower stand solitary and alone, like
that mysterious Newport one, or else be sole survivor of some perished
castle.

Now, with reference to the Enchanted Isles, we are fortunately supplied
with just such a noble point of observation in a remarkable rock, from its
peculiar figure called of old by the Spaniards, Rock Rodondo, or Round
Rock. Some two hundred and fifty feet high, rising straight from the sea
ten miles from land, with the whole mountainous group to the south and
east, Rock Rodondo occupies, on a large scale, very much the position which
the famous Campanile or detached Bell Tower of St. Mark does with respect
to the tangled group of hoary edifices around it.

Ere ascending, however, to gaze abroad upon the Encantadas, this sea tower
itself claims attention. It is visible at the distance of thirty miles,
and, fully participating in that enchantment which pervades the group, when
first seen afar invariably is mistaken for a sail. Four leagues away, of a
golden, hazy noon, it seems some Spanish admiral's ship, stacked up with
glittering canvas. Sail ho! Sail ho! Sail ho! from all three masts. But
coming nigh, the enchanted frigate is transformed apace into a craggy keep.

My first visit to the spot was made in the gray of the morning. With a view
of fishing, we had lowered three boats, and, pulling some two miles from
our vessel, found ourselves just before dawn of day close under the
moonshadow of Rodondo. Its aspect was heightened, and yet softened, by the
strange double twilight of the hour. The great full moon burnt in the low
west like a half-spent beacon, casting a soft mellow tinge upon the sea
like that cast by a waning fire of embers upon a midnight hearth; while
along the entire east the invisible sun sent pallid intimations of his
coming. The wind was light, the waves languid; the stars twinkled with a
faint effulgence; all nature seemed supine with the long night-watch, and
half-suspended in jaded expectation of the sun. This was the critical hour
to catch Rodondo in his perfect mood. The twilight was just enough to
reveal every striking point, without tearing away the dim investiture of
wonder.

From a broken, stairlike base, washed as the steps of a water palace by the
waves, the tower rose in entablatures of strata to a shaven summit. These
uniform layers, which compose the mass, form its most peculiar feature. For
at their lines of junction they project flatly into encircling shelves,
from top to bottom, rising one above another in graduated series. And as
the eaves of any old barn or abbey are alive with swallows, so were all
these rocky ledges with unnumbered seafowl. Eaves upon eaves, and nests
upon nests. Here and there were long birdlime streaks of a ghostly white
staining the tower from sea to air, readily accounting for its saillike
look afar. All would have been bewitchingly quiescent were it not for the
demoniac din created by the birds. Not only were the eaves rustling with
them, but they flew densely overhead, spreading themselves into a winged
and continually shifting canopy. The tower is the resort of aquatic birds
for hundreds of leagues around. To the north, to the east, to the west,
stretches nothing but eternal ocean; so that the man-of-war hawk coming
from the coasts of North America, Polynesia, or Peru, makes his first land
at Rodondo. And yet, though Rodondo be terra firma, no land bird ever
lighted on it. Fancy a red robin or a canary there! What a falling into the
hands of the Philistines when the poor warbler should be surrounded by such
locust-flights of strong bandit birds, with long bills cruel as daggers.