CHAPTER XIV.
"I went againe to the ruines, for it was no longer a
Citty"—the Drive by Moonlight—Through the Ruins—After the Fire—A City of Ashes—The Buried Silver—The Sentinel Chimneys—The Home of Luxuriance—A Recollection—The Moon and the Church—Back Again.
Shelley's white-orbed maiden sits in the sky, and already her pale torch is silvering the peaks of the ruins. Let us take a carriage, and drive round the desolate city, slowly and softly, and view the giant wreck which the fire has made. There is no better time than the
present. The moon is up, and quietness reigns. It is as light as day. We will drive first to the barrack-ground, and look up the long hills. Three days have passed, and the first excitement is now over. A thousand weary pilgrims have made the journey to this desert of desolation a hundred times since the fire, and vainly dug on the site where their homes once were, for relics, or perhaps something more. Why, look there! it is past midnight, and those three men you see working by that blackened wall, seem so wrapped up in their occupation, that they scarcely speak to one another, or note the presence of any one but themselves. See, they are carrying away the still hot bricks, and throwing into the street bits of iron and charred wood. Look, watch them for a moment—witness how they
"Dig, dig, dig, amid earth, and mortar, and stone,
And dig, dig, dig, among ruins overthrown;
Spade, and basket, and pick, the toiling Arabs ply."
How monotonous the work appears, and how strangely weird everything looks. To speak now, and hail these men, would break the charm—would interrupt the gaunt and gloomy silence of the place. But the presence of these excavators, at such an hour as this, arouses our curiosity. We know that the standard authorities tell us, that no matter how deeply men may dig for the pirate's buried treasure, if any one speaks during the performance of the work, the spell becomes broken, the enchantment passes away, and the iron box of doubloons vanishes. We have no means of disputing this, and wouldn't if we could. We have no desire to attempt to prove the contrary, but rather incline to the belief that the authorities are right, for we have it on the word of a gentleman who once owned a mineral rod, and whose word is undoubted, that a certain Miss Pitts, who was engaged all her life in digging about the gardens of her neighbours, and who never found anything up to the day of her death, confessed to him during her last illness, that her tongue had spoiled all. Had she but kept quiet when her spade struck the iron-box, all would have been well. But her joy was so great at the sight of the treasure, that she couldn't contain herself longer, and giving utterance to her feelings she spoke, and the box of course, immediately sank. The truth of this narrative can be established by excellent witnesses, and Miss Pitts, whatever her other
faults might be, had always a splendid reputation for veracity. She made and sold mineral rods too, and, in explaining their miraculous properties, gave out the advice that, by a judicious and constant use of her peculiar make of mineral rod, the whole world might speedily become rich, and at very trifling cost, thus exhibiting a vein of disinterestedness, as generous as it was rare. We say then, in the face of all this, and at the risk of destroying what happiness yet remained in the minds of the men who were thus toiling through the ghostly hour of twelve, we drew rein and hailed them. We couldn't help it. Our curiosity got the better of us, and we asked them what they were digging for. They were hunting for treasures, truly, not the pirate's though, but their own. During the fire, and unable to hire a team at any price, they had dug a deep hole in the cellar of the house and buried there, what jewelry and silver-ware they could scrape together. They were now hunting for it, and eventually they found it, in not even a discoloured state.
But let us go on. A very pleasant wind is fanning our foreheads, and there is a charm about this drive which we never experienced before. A grim charm truly, but nevertheless, a charm after all. Are we not going to see the ruins. The ruins which came to us in a night—the heritage of the fire. We have a Dunga and a Dugga, and a Carthage of our own. In a few brief hours we had a desolation here, which, in other lands it took great centuries to create. We have crumbling ruins, and shapeless masses of stone