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    The Encantadas Or Enchanted Isles: Short Story
    The Encantadas Or Enchanted Isles: Short Story
    The Encantadas Or Enchanted Isles: Short Story
    Ebook85 pages1 hour

    The Encantadas Or Enchanted Isles: Short Story

    By Herman Melville

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    About this ebook

    The ten “sketches” comprising The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles are based largely on author Herman Melville’s experience in the Galápagos Islands, combined with the recorded history of the islands, local folklore, and sailors’ stories.

    The earlier sketches present a daunting description of the islands and their fauna. Belying their tropical location, there is nothing of paradise in these volcanic remnants—home to large numbers of lizards, snakes, and giant spiders—and the Galápagos Islands are isolated, desolate, and uninhabitable. However, they are not without their idiosyncratic charm for Melville, and the later sketches tell the stories of some of those inhabitants—buccaneers, the “dog-king” of Charles’s Island, the “Chola widow,” and Oberlus, the hermit.

    HarperPerennial Classics brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperPerennial Classics collection to build your digital library.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateJun 17, 2014
    ISBN9781443435086
    The Encantadas Or Enchanted Isles: Short Story
    Author

    Herman Melville

    Herman Melville (1819-1891) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet who received wide acclaim for his earliest novels, such as Typee and Redburn, but fell into relative obscurity by the end of his life. Today, Melville is hailed as one of the definitive masters of world literature for novels including Moby Dick and Billy Budd, as well as for enduringly popular short stories such as Bartleby, the Scrivener and The Bell-Tower.

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      Book preview

      The Encantadas Or Enchanted Isles - Herman Melville

      Sketch First

      The Isles at Large

      —"That may not be, said then the Ferryman,

      Least we unweeting hap to be fordonne:

      For those same islands seeming now and then,

      Are not firme lande, nor any certein wonne,

      But straggling plots which to and fro do ronne

      In the wide waters; therefore are they hight

      The wandring Islands. Therefore doe them shonne;

      For they have oft drawne many a wandring wight

      Into most deadly daunger and distressed plight;

      For whosoever once hath fastened

      His foot thereon may never it recure,

      But wandreth ever more uncertain and unsure."

      "Darke, dolefull, drearie, like a greedie grave,

      That still for carrion carcases doth crave:

      On top whereof aye dwelt the ghastly Owle,

      Shrieking his balefull note, which ever drave

      Far from that haunt all other cheareful fowle,

      And all about it wandring ghostes did wayle and howle."

      Take five-and-twenty heaps of cinders dumped here and there in an outside city lot; imagine some of them magnified into mountains, and the vacant lot the sea; and you will have a fit idea of the general aspect of the Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles. A group rather of extinct volcanoes than of isles; looking much as the world at large might, after a penal conflagration.

      It is to be doubted whether any spot of earth can, in desolateness, furnish a parallel to this group. Abandoned cemeteries of long ago, old cities by piecemeal tumbling to their ruin, these are melancholy enough; but, like all else which has but once been associated with humanity, they still awaken in us some thoughts of sympathy, however sad. Hence, even the Dead Sea, along with whatever other emotions it may at times inspire, does not fail to touch in the pilgrim some of his less unpleasurable feelings.

      And as for solitariness; the great forests of the north, the expanses of unnavigated waters, the Greenland ice fields, are the profoundest of solitudes to a human observer; still the magic of their changeable tides and seasons mitigates their terror; because, though unvisited by men, those forests are visited by the May; the remotest seas reflect familiar stars even as Lake Erie does; and in the clear air of a fine polar day, the irradiated, azure ice shows beautifully as malachite.

      But the special curse, as one may call it, of the Encantadas, that which exalts them in desolation above Idumea and the Pole, is, that to them change never comes; neither the change of seasons nor of sorrows. Cut by the equator, they know not autumn, and they know not spring; while already reduced to the lees of fire, ruin itself can work little more upon them. The showers refresh the deserts; but in these isles, rain never falls. Like split Syrian gourds left withering in the sun, they are cracked by an everlasting drought beneath a torrid sky. Have mercy upon me, the wailing spirit of the Encantadas seems to cry, and send Lazarus that he may dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, for I am tormented in this flame.

      Another feature in these isles is their emphatic uninhabitableness. It is deemed a fit type of all-forsaken overthrow, that the jackal should den in the wastes of weedy Babylon; but the Encantadas refuse to harbor even the outcasts of the beasts. Man and wolf alike disown them. Little but reptile life is here found: tortoises, lizards, immense spiders, snakes, and that strangest anomaly of outlandish nature, the aguano. No voice, no low, no howl is heard; the chief sound of life here is a hiss.

      On most of the isles where vegetation is found at all, it is more ungrateful than the blankness of Aracama. Tangled thickets of wiry bushes, without fruit and without a name, springing up among deep fissures of calcined rock, and treacherously masking them; or a parched growth of distorted cactus trees.

      In many places the coast is rock-bound, or, more properly, clinker-bound; tumbled masses of blackish or greenish stuff like the dross of an iron-furnace, forming dark clefts and caves here and there, into which a ceaseless sea pours a fury of foam; overhanging them with a swirl of gray, haggard mist, amidst which sail screaming flights of unearthly birds heightening the dismal din. However calm the sea without, there is no rest for these swells and those rocks; they lash and are lashed, even when the outer ocean is most at peace with, itself. On the oppressive, clouded days, such as are peculiar to this part of the watery equator, the dark, vitrified masses, many of which raise themselves among white whirlpools and breakers in detached and perilous places off the shore, present a most Plutonian sight. In no world but a fallen one could such lands exist.

      Those parts of the strand free from the marks of fire, stretch away in wide level beaches of multitudinous dead shells, with here and there decayed bits of sugarcane, bamboos, and cocoanuts, washed upon this other and darker world from the charming palm isles to the westward and southward; all the way from Paradise to Tartarus; while mixed with the relics of distant beauty you will sometimes see fragments of charred wood and mouldering ribs of wrecks. Neither will anyone be surprised at meeting these last, after observing the conflicting currents which eddy throughout nearly all the wide channels of the entire group. The capriciousness of the tides of air sympathizes with those of the sea. Nowhere is the wind so light, baffling, and every way unreliable, and so given to perplexing calms, as at the Encantadas. Nigh a month has been spent by a ship going from one isle to another, though but ninety miles between; for owing to the force of the current, the boats employed to tow barely suffice to keep the craft from sweeping upon the cliffs, but do nothing towards accelerating her voyage. Sometimes it is impossible for a vessel from afar to fetch up with the group itself, unless large allowances for prospective leeway have been made ere its coming in sight. And yet, at other times, there is a mysterious indraft, which irresistibly draws a passing vessel among the

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