After landing the Governor on the opposite side, Captain Nares returned for me, and we rowed round the weird little lake. It was certainly very curious and beautiful; evidently a huge cavity out of which the calcareous sand had been washed or dissolved, and whose walls, still to a certain extent permeable, had been hardened and petrified by the constant percolation of water charged with carbonate of lime. From the roof innumerable stalactites, perfectly white, often several yards long and coming down to the delicacy of knitting-needles, hung in clusters; and wherever there was any continuous crack in the roof or wall, a graceful, soft-looking curtain of white stalactite fell, and often ended, much to our surprise. Deep in the water Stalagmites also rose up in pinnacles and fringes through the water, which was so exquisitely still and clear that it was something difficult to tell where the solid marble tracery ended, and its reflected image began. In this cave, which is a considerable distance from the sea, there is a slight change of level with the tide sufficient to keep the water perfectly pure. The mouth of the cave is overgrown with foliage, and every tree is draped and festooned with the fragrant Jasminum gracile, mingled not unfrequently with the "poison ivy" (Rhus toxicodendron). The Bermudians, especially the dark people, have a most exaggerated horror of this bush. They imagine that if one touch it or rub against it he becomes feverish, and is covered with an eruption. This is no doubt entirely mythical. The plant is very poisonous, but the perfume of the flower is rather agreeable, and we constantly plucked and smelt it without its producing any unpleasant effect. The tide was with us when we regained the Flats Bridge, and the galley shot down the rapid like an arrow, the beds of scarlet sponges and the great lazy trepangs showing perfectly clearly on the bottom at a fathom depth.
FIG. 1. CALCAREOUS CONCRETION SIMULATING A FOSSIL PALM-STEM, BOAZ ISLAND, BERMUDAS.
Every here and there throughout the islands there are groups of bodies of very peculiar form projecting from the surface of the limestone where it has been weathered. These have usually been regarded as fossil palmetto stumps, the roots of trees which have been overwhelmed with sand and whose organic matter has been entirely removed and replaced by carbonate of lime. Fig. 1 represents one of the most characteristic of these from a group on the side of the road in Boaz Island. It is a cylinder a foot in diameter and six inches or so high; the upper surface forms a shallow depression an inch deep surrounded by a raised border; the bottom of the cup is even, and pitted over with small depressions like the marks of rain-drops on sand; the walls of the cylinder seem to end a few inches below the surface of the limestone in a rounded boss, and all over this there are round markings or little cylindrical projections like the origins of rootlets. The object certainly appears to agree even in every detail with a fossil palm-root, and as the palmetto is abundant on the islands and is constantly liable to be destroyed by and ultimately enveloped in a mass of moving sand, it seemed almost unreasonable to question its being one. Still something about the look of these things made me doubt, with General Nelson, whether they were fossil palms, or indeed whether they were of organic origin at all; and after carefully examining and pondering over several groups of them, at Boaz Island, on the shore at Mount Langton, and elsewhere, I finally came to the conclusion that they were not fossils, but something totally different.
FIG. 2. CALCAREOUS CONCRETION IN AEOLIAN LIMESTONE, BERMUDAS.
FIG. 3. CALCAREOUS CONCRETION IN AEOLIAN LIMESTONE, BERMUDAS.
FIG. 4. CALCAREOUS CONCRETION, BERMUDAS.