I must have battled through this veritable inferno of vegetation for at least an hour—though it seemed a life-time. Clouds of particularly unpleasant midges filled my eyes, not to speak of mosquitoes, and a peculiar kind of persistent stinging fly was adding to my miseries, when at last, begrimed and dripping with sweat, I stumbled out, with a cry of thankfulness, on to comparatively fresh air, and something like a broad avenue running north and south through the wood. It was indeed densely overgrown, and had evidently not been used for many years. Still, it was comparatively passable, and one could at least see the sky, and take long breaths once more.
The rock here emerged again in places through the scanty soil, but it had evidently been levelled here and there, so as to make it serve as a rough but practicable road, though plainly it was years since any vehicles had passed that way. Still, there was no sign of a house anywhere. Presently, however, as I stumbled along, I noticed something looming darkly through the matted forest on my left, that suggested walls. Looking closer, I saw that it was the ruin of a small stone cottage, roofless, and indescribably swallowed up in the pitiless scrub. And then, near by, I descried another such ruin, and still another—all, as it were, sunk in the terrible gloom of the vegetation, as sometimes, at low tide, one can discern the walls of a ruined village at the bottom of the sea.
As I struggled on, and my eyes grew accustomed to looking for them, I detected still more of these ruins, of various shapes and sizes, impenetrably smothered but a few yards inward on each side of the road.
Evidently I had come upon a long-abandoned settlement, and presently, on some slightly higher ground to the left, I thought I could make out the half-submerged walls of a much more ambitious edifice. Looking closer, I noted, with a thrill of surprise, the beginning of a very narrow path, not more than a foot wide, leading up through the scrub in its direction. Narrow as it was, it had clearly been kept open by the not-infrequent passage of feet. With a certain eerie feeling, I edged my way into it, and, after following it for a hundred yards or so, found myself close to the roofless ruin of a spacious stone house with something of the appearance of an old English manor house. Mullioned windows, finely masoned, opened in the shattered wall, and an elaborate stone staircase, in the interstices of which stout shrubs were growing, gave, or once had given, an entrance through an arched doorway—an entrance now stoutly disputed by the glistening trunk of a gum-elemi tree and endless matted rope-like roots of giant vines and creepers that writhed like serpents over the whole edifice. Forcing my way up this staircase, I found myself in a stone hall some sixty feet long, at one end of which yawned a huge fireplace, its flue mounting up through a finely carved chimney, still standing firmly at the top of the southern gable. Sockets in the walls, on either side, where massive beams had once lodged, showed that the building had been in three stories, though all the floors had fallen in and made a mound of rubble in the centre of the hall where I stood.
At my entrance something moved furtively out of the fireplace, and shot with a rustle into the surrounding woods. It looked like a small alligator, and was indeed an iguana, one of the few reptiles of these islands.
At the base of a tall fig tree—flourishing in one of the corners, its dense, wide branching top making a literal roof for the otherwise roofless hall—an enormous ant's nest was plastered, a black excrescence looking like burnt paper, and which crumbled like soft crisp cinder as I poked it with the barrel of my gun, to the dismay of its myriad little red inhabitants—the only denizens it would seem of this once-magnificent hall.
How had this almost baronial magnificence come to be in this far-away corner of a desert island? At first I concluded that here was a relic of the brief colonial prosperity of the Bahamas, when its cotton lords lived like princes, with a slave population for retainers—days when even the bootblacks in Nassau played pitch-and-toss with gold pieces; but as I considered further, it seemed to me that the style of the architecture and the age of the building suggested an earlier date. Could it be that this had been the home of one of those early eighteenth-century pirates who took pride in flaunting the luxury and pomp of princes, and who had perhaps made this his headquarters and stronghold for the storage of his loot on the return from his forays on the Spanish Main? This, as the more spirited conjecture, I naturally preferred, and, in default of exact information, decided to accept.
Who knows but that in this hall where the iguana lurked and the ants laboured at their commonwealth, the redoubtable "Blackbeard"—known in private life as Edward Teach—had held his famous "Satanic" revels, decked out in the absurd finery of crimson damask waistcoat and breeches, a red feather in his hat, and a diamond cross hanging from a gold chain at his neck? There, perhaps, glass in hand, and "doxy on his knee," he had roared out many a blood-curdling ditty in the choice society of ruffians only less ruffianly than himself. Perhaps, too, this other spacious building adjacent to the great hall, and connected with it by a ruinous covered way, had been the sybarite's "harem"; for "Blackbeard"—like that other famous gentleman whose beard was blue—collected from his unfortunate captive ships treasure other than doubloons and pieces of eight, and prided himself on his fine taste in ladies.
The more I pondered upon this fancy, and remarked the extent of the ruins—including several subsidiary out-houses—and noted, too, one or two choked stone staircases that seemed to descend into the bowels of the earth, the more plausible it seemed. In one or two places where I suspected underground cellars—dungeons for unhappy captives belike, or strong vaults for the storage of the treasure—I tested the floors by dropping heavy stones, and they seemed unmistakably to reverberate with a hollow rumbling sound; but I could find no present way of getting down into them. As I said, the staircases that promised an entrance into them were choked with debris. But I promised myself to come some other day, with pick and shovel, and make an attempt at exploring them.
Meanwhile, after poking about in as much of the ruins as I could penetrate, I stepped out through a gap in one of the walls and found myself again on the path by which I had entered. I noticed that it still ran on farther north, as having a destination beyond. So leaving the haunted ruins behind, I pushed on, and had gone but a short distance when the path began to descend slightly from the ridge on which the ruins stood; and there, in a broad square hollow before me, was the welcome living green of a flourishing plantation of cocoanut palms! It was evidently of considerable extent—a quarter of a mile or so, I judged—and the palms were very thick and planted close together. To my surprise, too, I observed, as at length the path brought me to them after a sharp descent, that they were fenced in by a high bamboo stockade, for the most part in good condition, but here and there broken down with decay.