Tempest-Driven: A Romance (Vol. 2 of 3)

by Richard Dowling

The sun and moon and winds are leagued against the pastoral earth. Daily the sun transports millions of tons of water from the harmless plains of deep-sea waters, and the wind takes these vaporous foes of the land and hurls them on the loftiest mountains, so that they may gain the greatest speed and rending force and carrying power as they fly back with spoils of earth to their old friend the sea. The sun splits the cliffs with heat, and the winds lend fascines to the waves, so that the injured portions may be reached, cast down, and another line of defence destroyed.

Lest the sun and the winds and the rivers are not enough to accomplish the ruin of man's territory, the moon--the gentle moon of poets and lovers--the cold, frigid moon helps with that coldest of all things on earth, the glacier, to complete the havoc. The power of the wind is but partial, intermittent; that of the moon and the glacier general, everlasting. The tides are the heights commanding the outworks of the land; the moving fields of ice unsuspected traitors, in the garb of solidity, sapping the walls of the citadel.

Even now the list of enemies is not complete. In the core and centre of the earth itself the arch-traitor, the mightiest traitor of all, lies, gravitation, which should naturally be the lieutenant of the denser of the two combatants. This is the most relentless, the most unmerciful leveller of all. It seizes with equal avidity upon the moat that the sunlight only makes visible, and the loosened but yet unapportioned cliff of a thousand feet high, cut by the river of a Mexican cañon.

Electricity, the irresistible enemy and imponderable slave of man, is on the side of the waters. It binds the vapours of the oceans together, and scatters them when it reaches the hills. It rends trees and stones and buildings, and flings them down ready for easy porterage by the more methodical water.

One of these forces that ought to be on the side of the land, gravitation, has deserted its own side for the water. It is one force, and is universally operative. One of these forces that ought to be on the side of the sea has deserted its own side for the land. It is one force, but it operates through hundreds of thousands, of millions of agents; it is the coral insect. It transmutes the waters which give life and sustenance to it into land against which the waters war. It raises up an island where there ought to be two hundred fathoms of water. It uses up more material in making islands than all the great rivers put together deposit at their deltas.

The only loyal servant land has is the central fire. It can throw up in one minute as much as all the others can tear down in a hundred years. The central fire pushes an ocean aside with as much ease as a wave raises a boat. It throws up the Andes in less time than it took the sea, with its allied forces, to rob England of Lyonnesse.

The coral insect and the central fire, the least and the hugest of the world's working forces, are more than equal to all the forces arrayed against them, and are the humble and the terrible friends of man.

Here, by this gloomy sea, no coral insect toiled, no earthquake heaved, no volcano thrust up a flaming torch of hope to heaven. Here the enemies of the land had no foe to encounter but the resolute indifference of the veteran cliffs. Here the sea, and the tides, and the winds, and gravitation worked on unchallenged by active resistance. Year after year, almost imperceptible pieces of cliff fell, were engulfed. Year after year the incessant action of the waves was gnawing deeper and deeper into the heart of the land. Year after year the adamantine substance of the Black Rock was diminishing, though in a generation no man noticed a change in the Rock, and few a change in the cliff.

This coast was honeycombed with caves. In the summer time, when the weather was fine, pleasure parties put off from Kilcash for "The Caves," as the district in which they were to be found was, with peculiar want of fancy or imagination in so imaginative a race, called by the inhabitants of the village.

The region of caves was all to the east of Kilcash, and extended along several miles of coast. Some caves were wide-mouthed, shallow, low, uninteresting; others spacious, lofty, ramified. In order to excite curiosity and inspire awe, some were reported to be unexplored; others had legends. Others had sad stories of truthful tragedies. It was safe to enter one at low water only, and safe to stay no longer than a few minutes because of the stalactites. If you wished to see another, and not stay in its black, chill maw for four hours, you must go on the top of high water, and stay no more than a good hour. To a third you might go at any time of tide. To a fourth only on the last of the lowest of neaps, and then be quick and get away again. To a sixth only on the top of spring tides. To one, and one only, which might be entered at any state of tide--Never.