MARINE CAVES.
Effects of the Sea on Rocky Shores.—Fingal's Cave.—Beautiful Lines of Sir Walter Scott.—The Antro di Nettuno.—The Cave of Hunga.—Legend of its Discovery.—Marine Fountains.—The Skerries.—The Souffleur in Mauritius.—The Buffadero on the Mexican Coast.
Whoever has only observed the swelling of the tide on the flat coasts of the North Sea, has but a faint idea of the Titanic power which it develops on the rocky shores of the wide ocean. Even in fair weather, the growing flood, oscillating over the boundless expanse of waters, rises in tremendous breakers, so that it is impossible to behold their fury without feeling a conviction that the hardest rock must ultimately be ground to atoms by such irresistible forces.
Day after day, year after year, they renew their fierce attacks, and as in the high Alpine valleys the tumultuous torrents rushing from the glaciers tear deep furrows in the flanks of the mountains, thus it is here the sea which stamps the seal of its might on the vanquished rocks, corrodes them into fantastic shapes, scoops out wide portals in their projecting promontories, and hollows out deep caverns in their bosoms.
Here, also, water appears as the beautifying element, decorating inanimate nature with picturesque forms, and the sea nowhere exhibits more romantic scenes than on the rocky shores against which her waves have been beating for many a millennium. How manifold the shapes into which the rocky shores are worn! how numberless the changes which each varying season, nay, every hour of the day with its constant alternations of ebb and flood, of cloud and sunshine, of storm or calm, produces in their physiognomy! Our coasts abound in beauties such as these; but pre-eminent above all other specimens of Ocean's fantastic architecture is Fingal's Cave, which may well challenge the world to show its equal.
From afar, the small island of Staffa, rising precipitously from the sea, seems destitute of all romantic interest, but on approaching, the traveller is struck with the remarkable basaltic columns of which it is chiefly composed. Most of them rest upon a substratum of solid shapeless rock, and generally form colonnades upwards of fifty feet high, following the contours of the inlets or promontories, and overtopped with smaller hillocks. Along the west coast of the island they are tolerably irregular, but on the south side Staffa appears as an immense Gothic edifice, or rather as a forest of gigantic pillars seemingly arranged with all the regularity of art. The admiration they cause is, however, soon effaced when the vast cave to which the remote islet owes its world-wide celebrity bursts upon the view. Fancy a grotto measuring 250 feet in length by 53 in width at the entrance, and spanned by an arch 117 feet high, which, though gradually sloping towards the interior, still maintains a height of 70 feet at the farthest end of the cavern! The walls consist of rows of huge hexagonal basaltic pillars, which seem regularly to diminish according to the rules of perspective. The roof of the vault is formed of the remnants of similar columns, whose shafts have beyond a doubt been torn away by the sea, which, destroying them one after the other, has gradually excavated this magnificent temple of Nature. All their interstices, like those of the pillars, are cemented with a kind of pale yellow spar, which brings out all the angles and sides of their surfaces, and forms a pleasing contrast with the dark purple colour of the basalt.
The whole floor of the cave is occupied by the sea, the depth of which, even at its farthest end, is above six feet, during ebb-tide; but it is only in perfectly calm weather that a boat is able to venture into the interior, for when the sea is any way turbulent (and this is generally the case among the stormy Hebrides) it is in danger of being hurled against the walls of the grot and dashed to pieces. Under these circumstances, the only access into the cave is by a narrow dyke or ledge running along its eastern wall, about fifteen feet above the water. It is formed of truncated basaltic pillars, over which it is necessary to clamber with great caution and dexterity, as they are always moist and slippery from the dashing spray. Frequently there is only room enough for one foot, and while the left hand grasps that of the guide, it is necessary to hold fast with the right to a pillar of the wall. As this difficult path is most dangerous in the darkest part of the cave, but few tourists are bold enough to trust themselves to it, for the least false step must infallibly precipitate the adventurous explorer into the seething caldron below. Sometimes a cormorant, fearless of any accident of this kind, has built his nest upon the top of one of the truncated pillars, which form the pavement of the pathway, and betrays by a peevish hissing his ill humour at being disturbed in his solitary retreat by the intrusion of man.
Fingal's Cave.