"Around she pointed to a spacious cave,
Whose only portal was the keyless wave
(A hollow archway, by the sun unseen,
Save through the billows' glassy veil of green,
On some transparent ocean holiday,
When all the finny people are at play).
"Wide it was and high;
And showed a self-born Gothic canopy.
The arch upreared by Nature's architect,
The architrave some earthquake might erect;
The buttress from some mountain's bosom hurl'd,
When the poles crash'd and water was the world;
Or harden'd from some earth-absorbing fire,
While yet the globe reek'd from its funeral pyre.
The fretted pinnacle, the aisle, the nave,
Were there, all scoop'd by darkness from her cave.
There, with a little tinge of fantasy,
Fantastic faces mopp'd and mow'd on high;
And then a mitre or a shrine would fix
The eye upon its seeming crucifix.
Thus Nature played with the stalactites,
And built herself a chapel of the seas."
[E] A favourite pastime of the Polynesian chiefs.
[F] An intoxicating beverage extracted from the Piper methysticum, a species of pepper plant.
On many rocky shores the ocean has worn out subterraneous channels in the cliffs against which it has been beating for ages, and then frequently emerges in water-spouts or fountains from the opposite end. Thus, in the Skerries, one of the Shetland Islands, a deep chasm or inlet, which is open overhead, is continued under ground and then again opens to the sky in the middle of the island. When the water is high, the waves rise up through this aperture like the blowing of a whale in noise and appearance.
A similar phenomenon is exhibited on the south side of the Mauritius, at a point called "The Souffleur," or "The Blower." "A large mass of rock," says Lieutenant Taylor,[G] "runs out into the sea from the mainland, to which it is joined by a neck of rock not two feet broad. The constant beating of the tremendous swell, which rolls in, has undermined it in every direction, till it has exactly the appearance of a Gothic building with a number of arches. In the centre of the rock, which is about thirty-five or forty feet above the sea, the water has forced two passages vertically upwards, which are worn as smooth and cylindrical as if cut by a chisel. When a heavy sea rolls in, it of course fills in an instant the hollow caverns underneath, and finding no other egress, and being borne in with tremendous violence, it rushes up these chimneys and flies, roaring furiously, to a height of full sixty feet. The moment the wave recedes, the vacuum beneath causes the wind to rush into the two apertures with a loud humming noise, which is heard at a considerable distance. My companion and I arrived there before high water, and, having climbed across the neck of rock, we seated ourselves close to the chimneys, where I proposed making a sketch, and had just begun when in came a thundering sea, which broke right over the rock itself and drove us back much alarmed.
"Our negro guide now informed us that we must make haste to recross our narrow bridge, as the sea would get up as the tide rose. We lost no time and got back dry enough; and I was obliged to make my sketches from the mainland. In about three-quarters of an hour the sight was truly magnificent. I do not exaggerate in the least when I say that the waves rolled in, long and unbroken, full twenty-five feet high, till, meeting the headland, they broke clear over it, sending the spray flying over to the mainland; while from the centre of this mass of foam, the Souffleur shot up with a noise, which we afterwards heard distinctly between two and three miles. Standing on the main cliff, more than a hundred feet above the sea, we were quite wet. All we wanted to complete the picture was a large ship going ashore."
[G] Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London, vol. iii. 1833.