My Schools and Schoolmasters; Or, The Story of My Education

by Hugh Miller

I had never before seen the caves by torch-light; and though what I now witnessed did not quite come up to what I had read regarding the Grotto of Antiparos, or even the wonders of the Peak, it was unquestionably both strange and fine. The celebrated Dropping Cave proved inferior—as is not unfrequently the case with the celebrated—to a cave almost entirely unknown, which opened among the rocks a little further to the east; and yet even it had its interest. It widened, as one entered, into a twilight chamber, green with velvety mosses, that love the damp and the shade; and terminated in a range of crystalline wells, fed by the perpetual dropping, and hollowed in what seemed an altar-piece of the deposited marble. And above, and along the sides, there depended many a draped fold, and hung many a translucent icicle. The other cave, however, we found to be of much greater extent, and of more varied character. It is one of three caves of the old coast line, known as the Doocot or Pigeon Caves, which open upon a piece of rocky beach, overhung by a rudely semicircular range of gloomy precipices. The points of the semicircle project on either side into deep water—into at least water so much deeper than the fall of ordinary neaps, that it is only during the ebb of stream tides that the place is accessible by land; and in each of these bold promontories—the terminal horns of the crescent—there is a cave of the present coast-line, deeply hollowed, in which the sea stands from ten to twelve feet in depth when the tide is at full, and in which the surf thunders, when gales blow hard from the stormy north-east, with the roar of whole parks of artillery. The cave in the western promontory, which bears among the townsfolk the name of the "Puir Wife's Meal Kist," has its roof drilled by two small perforations—the largest of them not a great deal wider than the blow-hole of a porpoise—that open externally among the cliffs above; and when, during storms from the sea, the huge waves come rolling ashore like green moving walls, there are certain times of the tide in which they shut up the mouth of the cave, and so compress the air within, that it rushes upwards through the openings, roaring in its escape as if ten whales were blowing at once, and rises from amid the crags overhead in two white jets of vapour, distinctly visible, to the height of from sixty to eighty feet. If there be critics who have deemed it one of the extravagances of Goethe that he should have given life and motion, as in his famous witch-scene in "Faust," to the Hartz crags, they would do well to visit this bold headland during some winter tempest from the east, and find his description perfectly sober and true:

"See the giant crags, oh ho!

How they snort and how they blow!"

Within, at the bottom of the crescent, and where the tide never reaches when at the fullest, we found the large pigeon cave which we had come to explore, hollowed for about a hundred and fifty feet in the line of a fault. There runs across the opening the broken remains of a wall erected by some monopolizing proprietor of the neighbouring lands, with the intention of appropriating to himself the pigeons of the cavern; but his day, even at this time, had been long gone by, and the wall had sunk into a ruin. As we advanced, the cave caught the echoes of our footsteps, and a flock of pigeons, startled from their nests, came whizzing out, almost brushing us with their wings. The damp floor sounded hollow to the tread; we saw the green mossy sides, which close in the uncertain light, more than twenty feet overhead, furrowed by ridges of stalactites, that became whiter and purer as they retired from the vegetative influences; and marked that the last plant which appeared as we wended our way inwards was a minute green moss, about half an inch in length, which slanted outwards on the prominence of the sides, and overlay myriads of similar sprigs of moss, long before converted into stone, but which, faithful in death to the ruling law of their lives, still pointed, like the others, to the free air and the light. And then, in the deeper recesses of the cave, where the floor becomes covered with uneven sheets of stalagmite, and where long spear-like icicles and drapery-like foldings, pure as the marble of the sculptor, descend from above, or hang pendent over the sides, we found in abundance magnificent specimens for Sir George. The entire expedition was one of wondrous interest; and I returned next day to school, big with description and narrative, to excite, by truths more marvellous than fiction, the curiosity of my class-fellows.

I had previously introduced them to the marvels of the hill; and during our Saturday half-holidays, some of them had accompanied me in my excursions to it. But it had failed, somehow, to catch their fancy. It was too solitary, and too far from home, and, as a scene of amusement, not at all equal to the town-links, where they could play at "shinty" and "French and English," almost within hail of their parents' homesteads. The very tract along its flat, moory summit, over which, according to tradition, Wallace had once driven before him in headlong rout a strong body of English, and which was actually mottled with sepulchral tumuli, still visible amid the heath, failed in any marked degree to engage them; and though they liked well enough to hear about the caves, they seemed to have no very great desire to see them. There was, however, one little fellow, who sat in the Latin form—the member of a class lower and brighter than the heavy one, though it was not particularly bright either—who differed in this respect from all the others. Though he was my junior by about a twelvemonth, and shorter by about half a head, he was a diligent boy in even the Grammar School, in which boys were so rarely diligent, and, for his years, a thoroughly sensible one, without a grain of the dreamer in his composition. I succeeded, however, notwithstanding his sobriety, in infecting him thoroughly with my peculiar tastes, and learned to love him very much, partly because he doubled my amusements by sharing in them, and partly, I daresay—on the principle on which Mahomet preferred his old wife to his young one—because "he believed in me." Devoted to him as Caliban in the Tempest to his friend Trinculo—

"I showed him the best springs, I plucked him berries.

And I with my long nails did dig him pig-nuts."

His curiosity on this occasion was largely excited by my description of the Doocot Cave; and, setting out one morning to explore its wonders, armed with John Feddes's hammer, in the benefits of which my friend was permitted liberally to share, we failed, for that day at least, in finding our way back.

It was on a pleasant spring morning that, with my little curious friend beside me, I stood on the beach opposite the eastern promontory, that, with its stern granitic wall, bars access for ten days out of every fourteen to the wonders of the Doocot; and saw it stretching provokingly out into the green water. It was hard to be disappointed, and the caves so near. The tide was a low neap, and if we wanted a passage dry-shod, it behoved us to wait for at least a week; but neither of us understood the philosophy of neap-tides at the period. I was quite sure I had got round at low water with my uncles not a great many days before, and we both inferred, that if we but succeeded in getting round now, it would be quite a pleasure to wait among the caves inside until such time as the fall of the tide should lay bare a passage for our return. A narrow and broken shelf runs along the promontory, on which, by the assistance of the naked toe and the toe-nail, it is just possible to creep. We succeeded in scrambling up to it; and then, crawling outwards on all fours—the precipice, as we proceeded, beetling more and more formidable from above, and the water becoming greener and deeper below—we reached the outer point of the promontory; and then doubling the cape on a still narrowing margin—the water, by a reverse process, becoming shallower and less green as we advanced inwards—we found the ledge terminating just where, after clearing the sea, it overhung the gravelly beach at an elevation of nearly ten feet. Adown we both dropped, proud of our success; up splashed the rattling gravel as we fell; and for at least the whole coming week—though we were unaware of the extent of our good luck at the time—the marvels of the Doocot Cave might be regarded as solely and exclusively our own. For one short seven days—to borrow emphasis from the phraseology of Carlyle—"they were our own, and no other man's."

The first few hours were hours of sheer enjoyment The larger cave proved a mine of marvels; and we found a great deal additional to wonder at on the slopes beneath the precipices, and along the piece of rocky sea-beach in front. We succeeded in discovering for ourselves, in creeping, dwarf bushes, that told of the blighting influences of the sea-spray; the pale yellow honeysuckle, that we had never seen before, save in gardens and shrubberies; and on a deeply-shaded slope that leaned against one of the steeper precipices, we detected the sweet-scented woodroof of the flower-plot and parterre, with its pretty verticillate leaves, that become the more odoriferous the more they are crushed, and its white delicate flowers. There, too, immediately in the opening of the deeper cave, where a small stream came pattering in detached drops from the over-beetling precipice above, like the first drops of a heavy thunder-shower, we found the hot, bitter scurvy grass, with its minute cruciform flowers, which the great Captain Cook had used in his voyages; above all, there were the caves with their pigeons—white, variegated, and blue—and their mysterious and gloomy depths, in which plants hardened into stone, and water became marble. In a short time we had broken off with our hammers whole pocketfuls of stalactites and petrified moss. There were little pools at the side of the cave, where we could see the work of congelation going on, as at the commencement of an October frost, when the cold north wind ruffles, and but barely ruffles, the surface of some mountain lochan or sluggish moorland stream, and shows the newly-formed needles of ice projecting mole-like from the shores into the water. So rapid was the course of deposition, that there were cases in which the sides of the hollows seemed growing almost in proportion as the water rose in them; the springs, lipping over, deposited their minute crystals on the edges; and the reservoirs deepened and became more capacious as their mounds were built up by this curious masonry. The long telescopic prospect of the sparkling sea, as viewed from the inner extremity of the cavern, while all around was dark as midnight—the sudden gleam of the sea-gull, seen for a moment from the recess, as it flitted past in the sunshine—the black heaving bulk of the grampus, as it threw up its slender jets of spray, and then, turning downwards, displayed its glossy back and vast angular fin—even the pigeons, as they shot whizzing by, one moment scarce visible in the gloom, the next radiant in the light—all acquired a new interest, from the peculiarity of the setting in which we saw them. They formed a series of sun-gilt vignettes, framed in jet; and it was long ere we tired of seeing and admiring in them much of the strange and the beautiful. It did seem rather ominous, however, and perhaps somewhat supernatural to boot, that about an hour after noon, the tide, while there was yet a full fathom of water beneath the brow of the promontory, ceased to fall, and then, after A quarter of an hour's space, began actually to creep upwards on the beach. But just hoping that there might be some mistake in the matter, which the evening tide would scarce fail to rectify, we continued to amuse ourselves, and to hope on. Hour after hour passed, lengthening as the shadows lengthened, and yet the tide still rose. The sun had sunk behind the precipices, and all was gloom along their bases, and double gloom in their caves; but their rugged brows still caught the red glare of evening. The flush rose higher and higher, chased by the shadows; and then, after lingering for a moment on their crests of honeysuckle and juniper, passed away, and the whole became sombre and grey. The sea-gull sprang upwards from where he had floated on the ripple, and hied him slowly away to his lodge in his deep-sea stack; the dusky cormorant flitted past, with heavier and more frequent stroke, to his whitened shelf high on the precipice; the pigeons came whizzing downwards from the uplands and the opposite land, and disappeared amid the gloom of their caves; every creature that had wings made use of them in speeding homewards; but neither my companion nor myself had any; and there was no possibility of getting home without them. We made desperate efforts to scale the precipices, and on two several occasions succeeded in reaching mid-way shelves among the crags, where the sparrowhawk and the raven build; but though we had climbed well enough to render our return a matter of bare possibility, there was no possibility whatever of getting farther up: the cliffs had never been scaled before, and they were not destined to be scaled now. And so, as the twilight deepened, and the precarious footing became every moment more doubtful and precarious still, we had just to give up in despair. "Wouldn't care for myself," said the poor little fellow, my companion, bursting into tears, "if it were not for my mother; but what will my mother say?" "Wouldn't care neither," said I, with a heavy heart; "but it's just back water, and we'll get out at twall." We retreated together into one of the shallower and drier caves, and, clearing a little spot of its rough stones, and then groping along the rocks for the dry grass that in the spring season hangs from them in withered tufts, we formed for ourselves a most uncomfortable bed, and lay down in one another's arms. For the last few hours mountainous piles of clouds had been rising dark and stormy in the sea-mouth: they had flared portentously in the setting sun, and had worn, with the decline of evening, almost every meteoric tint of anger, from fiery red to a sombre thundrous brown, and from sombre brown to doleful black. And we could now at least hear what they portended, though we could no longer see. The rising wind began to howl mournfully amid the cliffs, and the sea, hitherto so silent, to beat heavily against the shore, and to boom, like distress-guns, from the recesses of the two deep-sea caves. We could hear, too, the beating rain, now heavier, now lighter, as the gusts swelled or sank; and the intermittent patter of the streamlet over the deeper cave, now driving against the precipices, now descending heavily on the stones.