There is a ghostliness in the name! Why Saint John of the pines? Was this low shore beshadowed in the sixteenth century by pines tremendous, immemorial, more ancient than man,—through whose colossal aisles the sea-gusts spake with utterance vague and vast as the Wind of the Spirit? Did the roar of the far-off reef, the mutterings of the mighty woods, evoke for Spanish piety dim fancies of the Voices of Patmos, of the Thunders and the Trumpetings?
It was a timber stronghold only,—that forgotten fort, thus placed beneath the protection of weird Saint John,—a rampart-work of pine. Then were discovered the virtues of the coquina,—that wonderful shell-rock which seems marble half formed, half crystallized, under the pressure of shallow seas; and out of it was Fort San Marco built,—very solidly, very mathematically, very slowly,—by the labor of more than a century and the expenditure of thirty millions of good Spanish dollars. Two hundred and fifty years ago they began to build it; to-day it stands well-nigh as strong as in the time when Oglethorpe's English cannon played on it in vain. Now the profane Americano, who putteth no trust in saints, but in his own strength only, calleth it Fort Marion; and the lizards dwell in it; and the spider weaves her tapestries above its chapel-altar; and the dust is deep in the holy-water fonts, where Catholic swordsmen once dipped their sinewy hands. But over the great sally-port you may still discern the Arms of Spain,—the Crown, the Shield, the triple turrets of Castile, the rampant Lions of Leon, and, encircling these, the sculptured Order of the Fleece of Gold. Salty winds have chapped the relief;—the fingers of the rain have worn it down as the smooth face of a coin is worn;—the wings of Time have brushed away the edges of the tablet,—and besmirched the Fleece of Gold,—and obliterated, as in irony, the title of the King, and the beginning of the solemn inscription,—REYNANDO EN ESPANA. The REY is gone forever!—syllable and potentate! Underneath the pendant Lamb,—now black,—there are dark stains of drippings,—as of blood streaming over the stone. Nothing could be more grotesquely realistic than the sculptured helplessness of that Lamb; yet we may well doubt if he who chiseled it was moved by any spirit of sardonic symbolism,—any memory of those Argonauts of the sixteenth century, who found a new Colchis in the West, and a new Fleece, whereof the shearing yielded in less than one generation three hundred tons of gold.
Now the moat is haunted by lizards and lovers only; and there are buzzards upon the sentry towers; and there are bats in the barbican:—it is just sixty-five years since the last Spanish trooper tramped out of the sally-port, never to come back. But squamated as the structure is, the dignity of it imposes awe,—the antiquated vastness of it compels respect for the vanished grandeur of Spain; the majesty of its desolation is unspeakable.—I think one feels it most on wild days, when the mighty drum-roll of the breakers is sounded from the harbor bar, and the winds of the Atlantic blow their mad clarions in the barbican, and all the white cavalry of Ocean charge the long coral coast.
... A Shadow descends the counterscarp of the sea-battery,—passes the covered way,—crosses the ditch,—mounts the scarp,—vanishes beyond the bastions. A moment more and it reappears,—still coming from the sea; it is moving in circles with a swift swimming motion, as of an opaqueness floating vaguely in the humors of the eye. Now it is only a passing fleck, a shapeless blot; now it is the phantom of a boat.
Look up, into the brightness,—into the violet blaze!—behold him hovering in the splendor of heaven, sailing before the sun, that Kharkas, 'dwelling in decay,'—whom the Parsee reveres. (For't is written that even the flitting of his shadow over the faces of the dead driveth out the unclean spirit that entereth into corpses.) 'From the height of his highest flight he discerneth if there be upon the ground a morsel of flesh not bigger than a hand; and for his comfort the odor of musk hath been created underneath his wing,'—How magnificent his soaring!—yet the vast pinions never beat; they veer only with his wheeling,—sometimes presenting to the meridian their whole black banner-breadth,—sometimes offering only the sabre-curves of their edges. He seems to float by volition alone,—to swim the deeps of day without effort. Higher and higher he mounts into the abyss of light; now he seems to hang beside the sun!—now he is only a whirling speck!—now he is gone!—My field-glass brings him again into view for a moment—sailing, circling, spiring by turns; but once more he dwindles into a mote, not bigger than a tiny flake of soot, which rises up, up, up, and vanishes away at last into luminous eternities unfathomable. Yet from those invisible heights his eye still scans the face of the land and the features of men—that wondrous eye far reaching as a beam of daylight. 'There is a path,' saith Job, 'which no fowl knoweth, and which the eye of the vulture hath not seen—But that path lies not open to the gaze of the sun; for whatsoever earthly thing the day-star hath looked upon, that thing the ken of the vulture also hath discerned. Rightly, therefore, hath the eye of the vulture been mythologically likened unto the eye of deities and of demons. Was not the sacred symbol of Isis, the Impenetrably Veiled,—Isis, mother of Gods, 'Eye of the Sun,' who by the quivering of her feathers createth light, who by the beating of her wings createth spirit,—a Golden Vulture, the saving emblem hung about the throat of the dead? And the vultures of the Vedic prayer to Indra, all-seeing demons; great sun-vultures of the Sanscrit epic, demi-gods. By vision alone it was given the bird Gatayus to know the past, the present, and that which was to come; for, encompassing the world in his flight, all things were discerned by his gaze.
O ghoul of the empyrean, well doth thy brother, the Shadow-caster of deserts, know the time of the going and the coming of the caravans; and he maketh likewise each year the pilgrimage to the tomb of the Prophet!—Thy cousins sit upon the Towers of Silence; and the charnel-pits of the dakhmas have no secrets for them! From the eternal silences of heaven,—from the heights that are echoless and never reached by human cry,—progenitors of thine have watched the faces of the continents wrinkle in the revolution of centuries; they have looked down upon the migrations of races; they have witnessed the growth and the extinction of nations; they have read the crimson history of a hundred thousand wars.
Another shadow crosses my feet—and yet another passes; the orbits of their circlings intercross. Hanging above the dark fort, those black silhouettes cutting sharply athwart the azure seem grimly appropriate to this desolation. Doubtless the birds have haunted the coast for centuries. The Spaniard, who gave many a rich feast of eyes and hearts, has passed away;—the Vulture remains, and waits. For what?—is it for some vomit of the spuming sea,—some putrefaction of the buzzing shambles?—or does he, indeed, still hope, even after the passing of three hundred years, for the return of Menendez?