"Acqu'ardiente," said one, approvingly, as he applied his fierce hooked nose to my empty flask, and then placed it in his pocket. A second snatched away my courier-bag, and a third appropriated my telescope, which he stuck in his sash.
Taking up a stone which lay at hand, I was about to hurl it at the head of the latter when the muzzle of a cocked musket pointed to my breast, and the butt of another applied roughly to my back, admonished me that discretion was the better part of valor.
"El page de escoba—ha, ha!" (the cabin boy), said one contemptuously, as he examined my attire—a smart blue jacket, with gilt anchor buttons, which Hislop had given me. My porte-monnaie, which contained only a few shillings, and my gold watch, a present given to me by my mother when I went to Eton, were soon taken from me. As for poor Tom, he possessed only a brass tobacco-box, a short black pipe, and one shilling and sixpence; yet he was speedily deprived of them by one who seemed to be the leader of the gang.
"You rascally Jack Spaniard!" said Tom, shaking his clenched fist in the robber's face, "if ever I haul alongside of you elsewhere, look out for squalls!"
At this they all laughed; and seizing us by the arms, dragged us into the back part of the cavern or fissure in the rocks, leaving one of their number, armed with a musket, as sentinel, at the entrance, where he lit a paper cigar, and stretching himself on the grassy bank, placed his hands under his head, and proceeded leisurely to smoke in the sunshine.
These proceedings filled us with great alarm; now that they had robbed us of everything save our clothes, what could their object be?
One of them produced two pieces of rope, with which our hands were tied. Dragged by some, and receiving severe blows and bruises from the clenched hands and musket-butts of others—accompanied by the imprecations and coarse laughter of all—we were conveyed through a low-roofed grotto, or natural gallery in the rocks, the echoes of which repeated their voices with a thousand reverberations.
The only light here was by the reflection of the sunshine at the entrance, where the basalt was coated by a white substance, the débris of some old volcanic eruption; for the slope, up which we had been ascending all the morning, formed a portion of the great Peak. And now we became sensible of a strange sound and a strange odor pervading all the place.
Through a rent in the rocky roof of the grotto there fell a clear bright stream of sunlight, that revealed the terrors of the place toward which our captors dragged us.
On one side there yawned a vast black fissure or chasm in the sombre masses of glassy obsidian and red blocks of lava which composed the floor of that horrid cavern; and from this fissure there ascended, and doubtless still ascends at times, a hot sulphureous steam, which rendered breathing difficult, and induced an inclination to sneeze.