At night-fall, the fallucha was in the chops of the outlets.
Appadocca thus saw himself, by a strange coincidence, in the same place and about the same time that he had jumped from the man-of-war. He gazed on the rolling waves which nature had surrounded with the terrors both of the animated and unanimated portions of creation. For the rocks beneath the impending mountains, together with the waves that looked merciless and unrelenting, raised at first sight the idea of sure destruction: while the huge repulsive sharks that are there to be seen in thousands reminded one of a still more painful and frightful death.
“Nil arduum,” muttered Appadocca, as he gazed on the scene of his daring adventure, “said the Roman poet, and no mortal ever enunciated a greater truth. Here are these overwhelming waves that seem to carry sure destruction on their frowning crest, that roll over an abyss, which if it were dry, would be difficult for man to fathom, that contain within themselves all sorts of huge and destructive monsters, in comparison to the smallest fins of which, man, enterprizing, achieving man, dwindles to the insignificance of the rose-twig by the side of the towering magnolia: still the human race subjugates them even in their fiercest mood, and from their frail fabric of boards and pitch, men make war on their dangerous denizens. Not only that, but I, my very self, at the hour of midnight, when man and beast retire to their habitations, and sleep away darkness and its horrors, I plunged into the terrific waters with only a clay-pot to help me through, and here I am, principally by dint of perseverance, safe and sound. Oh, human race, you know not your power; you know not what you could do if you would only throw away the superstitious fears in which you have enthralled yourselves, and venture to assume a position, which the indefiniteness of your intellect assuredly intends you for. But you must study the law of nature: until you do that, you cannot be fit to achieve great things; as you are, you are living merely like brutes, with this aggravation, that the resources of your reason give you a greater facility of corrupting yourselves, and of becoming cowardly and base, the natural effect of corruption.
“Had I permitted myself,” continued Appadocca, “to be nursed in the lap of an enervating luxury, either mental or bodily, to be surrounded with numbers of base menials, whose care was to prevent even the dew of heaven from falling too heavily upon me, who were to prepare the couches of indolence for me, who were to pamper my body, beyond the power of endurance, and at last transform me into an animal lacking thews and muscles? if I had been tutored to look upon the falling of a picture as a calamity, or been taught to tremble at the ramblings of a mouse; and more, had I permitted my mind to be enslaved by the ignorant notions of fiends, of horrors after death, and of all those things by which the world is made to quake in utter fear, should I have undertaken the execution of a design that would have been made to appear, even more terrible than that death in which its entire failure could have resulted? No, decidedly not.
“And, my good father,” a sardonic smile might have been marked about his lips, “rejoice while you can, amidst vain pomps and ceremonies, surrounded as you are again by smiling and sympathising sycophants, for your time of merry-making will be but short.”
Such were the half-muttered reflections of Appadocca as the fallucha crossed the bocas.
Having once cleared the straits, the little vessel drew closely under the land on the left side with her sails filled by the cool and gentle land breeze. She was sailing up to Port-of-Spain, among the beautiful little islands with which the reader was made acquainted at the beginning of this narrative. The curling wavelets of the smooth gulf broke on the sharp prow of the fast-sailing fallucha, and kept up a soothing music that invited to repose. The rustling of the trees that grew to the water’s edge, charmed the ear of the mariner; the land breeze wafted far out to sea the sweet perfumes of the wild flowers, which nature has known to create only in the tropics.
The little vessel was doubling a small promontory, and entering the beautiful bay which indents the coast about that part, and is known as “Chaguaradmas Bay,” when the hasty splashes of several oars were suddenly heard, while, from the darkness of the night, the approaching boat was still unseen.
The splashes every moment grew more and more loud and distinct, they sounded more and more near, and suddenly a large boat, pulled by ten armed men, appeared, and the next instant the fallucha was boarded; as nimbly as antelopes the men jumped into the little craft.