Oliver Ellis

by James Grant

The dawn of day always filled me with new hope, but the fall of night with heart-broken wretchedness.

On a day of more than common beauty, I had grown weary of surveying the ever lonely sea, and descended from the cliff to the shore. As the sun went westward, the water assumed a deeper blue; the lower part of my island became almost black in its depth of greenness; but the summits of its rocks and tufted pines were tinted by a red glow exceeding any effect a mortal pencil could produce.

Wandering listlessly on, I reached the cavern which, as already mentioned, opened on the southern side of the isle. The cool shade of this vast recess allured me on this day to enter it. There was something solemn and majestic in its height and depth—its walls of rock, covered by luxuriant creepers, and its roof, a perfect but natural arch, encrusted with scoriae, blocks of quartz, and studded by crystals, the result of volcanic fires, while long stalactites, white as alabaster, hung from the basaltic ceiling like the crocketed pendants of a Gothic cathedral. A kind of natural path, formed by a ledge of rock, afforded easy access far into this cavern, and along this I proceeded.

The purity of the external atmosphere seemed to increase the wonderful depth to which I saw the bases of the rocks, the layers of coral and shells, the huge, slimy plants that waved their solemn and fan-like leaves a hundred feet below me; I could see the silver-scaled fishes that glanced and shot in and out of sight, while my own face and figure were reflected there as in a well—and a woeful aspect they presented, my tangled hair, my length of beard, my forehead, cheeks, and neck scorched to russet redness by the tropical sun.

Further within the cavern there was a strong and rank odour of mingled seaweed and rotten branches with the fungi that drooped from the rocks into the water.

To this retreat I often came to eat my dinner of broiled shell-fish and yams. Once, while reclined listlessly against the rocks, after my savage repast was over, and gazing vacantly into the calm depth of the water that rippled far away into the recesses of the cavern, suddenly a natural feature, which I had hitherto conceived to be a mere mass of weedy rock, seemed to assume a new form.

The upper portion of it was only three or four feet below the water; but lay like an enormous boulder-stone, wedged between the walls of the cavern. I strained my eyes—could I be deceived? No—it was a ship—the hull of a large but shattered ship, lying with its stern towards me, slightly heeled over to port, and covered by a mass of seaweed that waved in long green slimy leaves and tangles on every ripple of the water!

Here was a startling discovery and episode in my lonely hermit life.

I tore down and drew aside some of the thick mangroves and creepers which fringed the mouth of the cavern, and admitted more of the broad blaze of the noonday sunlight. Then I could distinctly perceive the mouldered hull of a vessel of some five hundred tons; but of a strange and antique form. High-prowed and square-pooped, her stern and quarters bore still the remains of elaborate carving, though the greater portion of her starboard side and most of her timberheads, with all her gunnel, had disappeared, either by the shock of the waves, when she had been thrown by a tempest and the force of the sea into this strange place, or by the gradual process of decay; but her stern-post and six stern-windows were distinctly traceable. I could see the fish darting through them into the watery recesses of her mouldering cabins. I could see where one or two pieces of cannon, an anchor, and other heavy masses of ironwork, had sunk by their own weight to the bottom, through the soft and spongy wood, which, by the length of time it had lain in the water, was now reduced almost to a pulp.

This ship had evidently been lifted by some mighty wave into the chasm and bulged there, and now all that remained of her was covered by an entire coating of barnacles and seaweed.