Cudjo's Cave

by J. T. Trowbridge

Comfortless, yet calm, she explored the ground for a resting-place. She cleared the twigs away from the roots of a tree, and laid herself down there on the moss and old leaves. Everything seemed dank with the never-failing dews of the deep and sheltered gorge; but she did not mind the dampness of her couch. A strong wind was rising, and the great trees above her swayed and moaned. She was vexed by mosquitoes that bit as if they then for the first time tasted blood, and never expected to taste it again; but she was too weary to care much for them either. She rested her arm on the mossy root; she rested her head on her arm; she drew her handkerchief over her face; she shut out from her soul all the miseries and dangers of her situation, and quietly said her prayers.

There is nothing that calms the perturbations of the mind like that inward looking for the light of God's peace which descends upon us when in silence and sweet trust we pray to him. A delicious sense of repose ensued, and her thoughts floated off in dreams.

She dreamed she was flying with her father from the fury of armed men. She led him into a wilderness; and it was night; and great rocks rose up suddenly before them in the gloom, and awful chasms yawned. Then she was wandering alone; she had lost her father, and was seeking him up and down. Then it seemed that Penn was by her side; and when she asked for her father he smilingly pointed upward at a wondrously beautiful light that shone from the summit of a hill. She sought to go up thither, but grew weary, and sat down to rest in a deep grove, with an ice-cold mountain stream dashing at her feet. Then the light on the hill became a lake of fire, and it poured its waves into the stream, and the stream flowed past her a roaring river of flame. Lightnings crackled in the air above her. Thunderbolts fell. The heat was intolerable. The river had overflowed, and set the world on fire. And she could not fly, for terror chained her limbs. She struggled, screamed, awoke. She started up. Her dream was a reality.

Either the fire set by the soldiers had spread, driven by the wind over the dry leaves, into the grove below her, or else they had fired the grove itself on their retreat. Her eyes opened upon a vision of appalling brightness. For a moment she stood utterly dazzled and bewildered, not knowing where she was. Memory and reason were paralyzed: she could not remember, she could not think: amazement and terror possessed her.

Instinctively shielding her eyes, she looked down. The ground where she had lain, the log, the sticks, the moss, and her handkerchief fallen upon it, were illumined with a glare brighter than noonday. At sight of the handkerchief came recollection. Her terrible adventure, the glow she had seen in the woods, her bed on the earth,—she remembered everything. And now the actual perils of her position became apparent to her returning faculties.

Where all was blackness when she lay down, now all was preternatural light. Every bush and jutting rock of the wild overhanging cliffs stood out in fearful distinctness. The saplings and trees on their summits, fifty feet above her head, seemed huddling together, and leaning forward terror-stricken, in an atmosphere of whirling flame and smoke. Climb those cliffs she could not, though she were to die.

She must then flee farther up into the deep and narrow gorge, or endeavor to escape by the way she had come. But the way she had come was fire.

The conflagration already enveloped the mouth of the gorge, shutting her in. The trunks of near trees stood like the bars of a stupendous cage, through which she looked at the raging demons beyond. Burning limbs fell, shooting through the air with trails of flame. Every tree was a pillar of fire. Here a bough, still untouched, hung, dark and impassive, against the lurid, surging chaos. Then the whirlwind of heated air struck it, and you could see it writhe and twist, until its darkness burst into flame. There stood what was late a lordly maple, but now,—trunk, and limb, and branch,—a tree of living coal. And down under this gulf of fire flowed the brook, into which showers of sparks fell hissing, while over all, fearfully illumined clouds of smoke and cinders and leaves went rolling up into the sky.

Virginia approached near enough to be impressed with the dreadful certainty that there was no outlet whatever, for any mortal foot, in that direction. Tortured by the heat, and pursued by lighted twigs, that fell like fiery darts around her, she fled back into the gorge.

The conflagration was still spreading rapidly. The timber along both sides of the gorge, at its opening, began to burn upwards towards the summits of the cliffs. Soon the very spot where she had slept, and where she now paused once more in her terrible perplexity and fear, would be an abyss of flame.