Chapter 5

Around the face of this huge column, and between the clefts, he now moved backward and forward, still ascending as he found convenient foothold. When he had ascended about one hundred and seventy feet from the earth, and had reached the point where the pillar overhangs the ravine, his heart seemed to fail him. He stopped, and seemed to us to be balancing midway between heaven and earth. We were in dread suspense, expecting every moment to see him dashed in atoms at our feet. We had already exhausted our powers of entreaty in persuading him to return, but all to no purpose. Now it was perilous even to speak to him, and very difficult to carry on conversation at all, from the immense height to which he had ascended, and the noise made by the bubbling of the little brook as it tumbled in tiny cascades over its rocky bed at our feet. At length he seemed to discover that one of the clefts before mentioned retreated backward from the overhanging position of the pillar. Into this he sprang at once, and was soon out of sight and out of danger.

There is not a word of truth in all that story about our hauling him up with ropes, and his fainting away so soon as he landed on the summit. Those acquainted with the localities will at once perceive its absurdity; for we were beneath the arch, and it is half a mile round to the top, and for the most part up a rugged mountain. Instead of fainting away, Mr. Piper proceeded down the hill to meet us and obtain his hat and shoes. We met about half-way, and then he lay down for a few moments to recover himself of his fatigue.

[Virginia possesses another marvel of nature's handiwork of the same general character as the Natural Bridge, and of which Mr. Pollard's description may here fitly be given.]

After progressing about three miles from the ford of the Clinch River, and after having repeatedly crossed its crooked tributary, Stock Creek, we come to a small mountain or globular hill which is our wondrous destination, for here is the Natural Tunnel. There is nothing which advertises in advance this great wonder, or in any way excites the expectations of the traveller. There is a common road, from which we depart a few hundred yards to make a half circuit of the base of the mountain, that goes clean over the ridge, leading to a settlement some miles farther, called Rye Cove, and which was once the abode of a fierce Indian tribe. This main road goes over the arch of the tunnel, furnishing a curious convenience to the traveller, of which he would be unaware, seeing nothing through the foliage but glimpses of the mural rocks that guard and sustain the termination of the secret passage-way many hundred feet below him. It is from this convenience that the neighboring people name the gigantic work of nature we are proceeding to explore a natural bridge. But this name is certainly insufficient and paltry for a rock-work that on one flank at least extends some eight hundred feet, and which, if regarded with reference to the breadth of the interval it spans, is, in fact, a complication of bridges, arranged, as we shall presently see, in one single massive spectacle.

The western face of the tunnel, near which we dismount, continues partly concealed from view, or is imperfectly exposed, until we nearly approach it, the immense rock which is perforated being here dressed with the thick foliage of the spruce-pine, and the harsh surface adorned with a beautiful tracery of vines and creepers. At last is seen the entrance of what appears to be a huge subterraneous cavern or grotto, into which the stream disappears; a towering rock rising here about two hundred feet above the surface of the stream, and a rude entrance gouged into it, varying in width, as far as the eye can reach, from one hundred to one hundred and fifty feet, and rising in a clear vault from seventy to eighty feet above the floor. The view here terminates in the very blackness of darkness; it is broken on the first curve of the tunnel. The bed of the stream, from which the water has disappeared on account of the drouth, the reduced currents sinking to lower subterranean channels, is piled with great irregular rocks, on the sharp points of which we stumble and cut our hands: there is no foothold but on rocks, and it is only when we have struggled through the awful, cruel darkness, holding up some feeble lights in it, and issued into the broad sunshine, that we find we have travelled nearly two hundred yards (or say, more exactly, five hundred feet) through one solid rock, in which there is not an inch of soil, not a seam, not a cleft, and which, even beyond the debouchure of the tunnel, yet runs away a hundred yards in a wall five hundred feet high, as clean and whetted as the work of the mason.

But we must not anticipate this majestical scene, "wonderful beyond all wondrous measure." Happily, in entering the tunnel from the western side we have adopted the course of exploration which affords a gradual ascent of the emotions, until at last they tower to the standard of a perfect sublimity. The course of the tunnel may be described as a continuous curve: it resembles, indeed, a prostrate S. For a distance of twenty yards midway of this course we are excluded from a view of either entrance, and the darkness is about that of a night with one quarter of the moon. The vault becomes lower here--in some places scarcely more than thirty feet high--and springs immediately from the floor. The situation is awful and oppressive: the voice sounds unnatural, and rumbles strangely and fearfully along the arch of stone. We are encoffined in the solid rock: there is a strange pang in the beating heart in its imprisonment, so _impenetrable_, black, hopeless, and we hurry to meet the light of day. In that light we are disentombed: we cast off the confinements of the black space through which we have passed, and we are instantly introduced to a scene so luminous and majestic that in a moment our trembling eyes are captivated and our hearts lifted in unutterable worship of the Creator's works.

It is that sheer wall of rock which we have already mentioned, where the arch and other side of the tunnel break away into the mountain slope; a high wall, slightly impending; an amphitheatre, extending one hundred yards, of awful precipices; a clean battlement, without a joint in it, five hundred feet high. And this splendid height and breadth of stone, that a thousand storms have polished, leaving not a cleft of soil in it,--this huge, unjointed masonry raised against the sky, gray and weather-stained, with glittering patches of light on it,--is yet part of the same huge rock which towered at the farther end of the tunnel, and through whose seamless cavity we have travelled two hundred yards. It is in this view that the mystery of the scene seizes the mind, and the last element of sublimity is added to it. It is in this view that the Natural Tunnel we had come to see as a mere "curiosity" takes rank among the greatest wonders of the world. What power, what possible imaginable agency of nature, could have worked out this stupendous scene?...

Turning our eyes away from the battlement of rock to the opposite side of the ravine, a new revelation of the grand and picturesque awaits us. Here a gigantic cliff, but one broken with rock and soil, and threaded to its summit by a sapling growth of the buckeye, the linden, and the pine, rises almost perpendicularly from the water's edge to a height almost equal to that of the opposite wall of rock. A natural platform is seen to project over it, and yet a few yards farther there is an insulated cliff, a cyclopean _chimney_, so to speak, scarcely more than a foot square at its top, rising in the form of a turret at least sixty feet above its basement, which is a portion of the imposing cliff we have mentioned. It is at once perceived that here are two points of view that will give us new and perhaps the most imposing aspects of the scene. To attain these points, however, it is necessary to make a circuit of half a mile; and the sinking sun admonishes us to defer this new interest of the scene until to-morrow....

We remounted for the tunnel in the early morning, and were soon to find that the rising sun was to give a new and unexpected glory to the scene. This time we ascend the mountain instead of deflecting as before. The road is easy; there are no difficulties of access to the points of view from the top of the tunnel, and they are undoubtedly the grandest. We pass to the platform before described by a few steps from the main road. It is a slab of rock projecting from an open patch of ground; a dead cedar-tree is standing at its edge, throwing its gnarled and twisted arms, as in wild and widowed sorrow, over the awful scene below. We now see the great opposite amphitheatre of rock in added grandeur, for we see it from above,--we see it across a chasm nine hundred feet wide and five hundred feet deep, and the exposure being almost exactly eastern, the long spears of the rising sun are being shattered on it. The effect is inexpressibly grand. But there is one more circumstance to be added to the scene; we do not see from this observatory the arch, the entrance of the tunnel. A few yards farther the fearful chimney-shaped rock invites to a more commanding view, but the ascent is dangerous; the stone on top is loose, and so narrow that two persons can scarcely stand on it. A single misstep, a moment's loss of balance, and we would fall into eternity. But now the sense of peril is lost, or is rather mingled, in the grandeur of the scene. It is a panoramic view. We have now the whole sweep of the mural precipice opposite; the sun's glitter is incessant on the polished stone; the trees which fringe the bottom appear now scarcely more than shrubs; the entrance of the tunnel has now come into view, and that which yesterday we thought so high and wide, now appears, from our amazing height, as a stooped door-way. We imagine the gloomy entrance into a cave of Erebus and Death, the broken rocks lying within which look like black and mangled entrails. It is a fearful picture,--it is that of a supernatural abode.

[This marvel of nature is not without its tradition,--one of Indian origin,--in which is repeated, with suitable variations, the familiar Lover's Leap narrative. A more prosaic and modern interest attaches to it, in its having been chosen as the route of a railroad, nature's contribution of a passage through a difficult mountain wall.]

PLANTATION LIFE IN WAR TIMES.

WILLIAM HOWARD RUSSELL.

[Russell, of former celebrity as war correspondent of _The Times_, visited the seceded States during the early period of the American Civil War. His letters thence, published later as "Pictures of Southern Life," are full of graphic descriptions of scenes and feelings in the Confederate States during the era of enthusiasm and hopefulness, before the war had borne its harvest of doubt and misery. It is not our purpose, however, to give his experiences in this special field. It is travel, not war, with which we are concerned, and we confine ourself to an account of a visit to a plantation in the vicinity of Charleston. A short preliminary sketch of the ebb and flow of rumor in war times, however, may be of interest.]

The rolling fire of the revolution is fast sweeping over the prairie, and one must fly before it or burn. I am obliged to see all that can be seen of the South at once, and then, armed with such safeguards as I can procure, to make an effort to recover my communications. Bridges broken, rails torn up, telegraphs pulled down,--I am quite in the air, and air charged with powder and fire. One of the most extraordinary books in the world could be made out of the cuttings and parings of the newspapers which have been published within the last few days. The judgments, statements, asseverations of the press, everywhere necessarily hasty, ill-sifted, and off-hand, do not aspire to even an ephemeral existence here. They are of use if they serve the purpose of the moment, and of the little boys who commence their childhood in deceit, and continue to adolescence in iniquity, by giving vocal utterance to the "sensation" headings of the journals they retail so sharply and so curtly.

Talk of the superstition of the Middle Ages, or of the credulity of the more advanced period of rural life; laugh at the Holy Coat of Treves, or groan over the Lady of Salette; deplore the faith in winking pictures, or in a _communiqué_ of the _Moniteur_; moralize on the superstition which discovers more in the liquefaction of the ichor of St. Gennaro than a chemical trick; but if you desire to understand how far faith can see and trust among the people who consider themselves the most civilized and intelligent in the world, you will study the American journals, and read the telegrams which appear in them.

One day the Seventh New York Regiment is destroyed for the edification of the South, and is cut up into such small pieces that none of it is ever seen afterwards. The next day it marches into Washington or Annapolis, all the better for the process. Another, in order to encourage the North, it is said that hecatombs of dead were carried out of Fort Moultrie, packed up, for easy travelling, in boxes. Again, to irritate both, it is credibly stated that Lord Lyons is going to interfere, or that an Anglo-French fleet is coming to watch the ports; and so on, through a wild play of fancy, inexact in line, as though the batteries were charged with the aurora borealis or summer lightning, instead of the respectable, steady, manageable offspring of acid and metal....

I am now, however, dealing with South Carolina, which has been the _fons et origo_ of the secession doctrines and their development into the full life of the Confederate States. The whole foundation on which South Carolina rests is cotton and a certain amount of rice; or rather she bases her whole fabric on the necessity which exists in Europe for those products of her soil, believing and asserting, as she does, that England and France cannot and will not do without them. Cotton, without a market, is so much flocculent matter encumbering the ground. Rice, without demand for it, is unsalable grain in store and on the field. Cotton at ten cents a pound is boundless prosperity, empire, and superiority, and rice and grain need no longer be regarded.

In the matter of slave labor, South Carolina argues pretty much in this way: England and France require our products. In order to meet their wants we must cultivate our soil. There is only one way of doing so. The white man cannot live on our land at certain seasons of the year; he cannot work in the manner required by the crops. He must, therefore, employ a race suited to the labor, and that is a race which will only work when it is obliged to do so.

[And so on throughout the old argument, which, fortunately, the logic of time has in great measure disproved. But, leaving this phase of the subject, we shall accompany our traveller on a visit to the land of rice and slave labor.]

Early one morning I started in a steamer to visit a plantation in the Pedee and Maccamaw district, in the island coast of the State, north of Charleston. Passing Sumter, on which men are busily engaged, under the Confederate flag, in making good damages and mounting guns, we put out a few miles to sea, and with the low sandy shore, dotted with soldiers and guard-houses and clumps of trees, on our left, in a few hours pass the Santee River, and enter an estuary into which the Pedee and Maccamaw run a few miles farther to the northwest.

The steamer ran alongside a jetty and pier, which was crowded by men in uniform, waiting for the news and for supplies of creature comforts. Ladies were cantering along the fine hard beach, and some gigs and tax-carts, fully laden, rolled along very much as one sees them at Scarborough. The soldiers on the pier were all gentlemen of the county. Some, dressed in gray tunics and yellow facings, in high felt-hats and plumes and jack-boots, would have done no discredit in face, figure, and bearing to the gayest cavaliers who ever thundered at the heels of Prince Rupert. Their horses, full of Carolinian fire and mettle, stood picketed under the trees along the margin of the beach. Among these men, who had been doing the duty of common troopers in patrolling the sea-coast, were gentlemen possessed of large estates and princely fortunes; and one who stood among them was pointed out to me as captain of a company, for whose use his liberality provided unbounded daily libations of champagne, and the best luxuries which French ingenuity can safely imprison in those well-known caskets with which Crimean warriors were not unacquainted at the close of the campaign.

They were eager for news, which was shouted out to them by their friends in the steamer, and one was struck by the intimate personal cordiality and familiar acquaintance which existed among them. Three heavy guns, mounted in an earthwork defended by palisades, covered the beach and the landing-place, and the garrison was to have been reinforced by a regiment from Charleston, which, however, had not got in readiness to go up on our steamer, owing to some little difficulties between the volunteers, their officers, and the quartermaster-general's department.

As the "Nina" approaches the tumble-down wharf, two or three citizens advance from the shade of shaky sheds to welcome us, and a few country vehicles and light phaetons are drawn forth from the same shelter to receive the passengers, while the negro boys and girls who have been playing upon the bales of cotton and barrels of rice, which represent the trade of the place on the wharf, take up commanding positions for the better observation of our proceedings. There is an air of quaint simplicity and old-fashioned quiet about Georgetown, refreshingly antagonistic to the bustle and tumult of most American cities. While waiting for our vehicle we enjoyed the hospitality of one of our friends, who took us into an old-fashioned angular wooden mansion, more than a century old, still sound in every timber, and testifying in its quaint wainscotings, and the rigid framework of door and window, to the durability of its cypress timbers and the preservative character of the atmosphere. In early days it was the crack house of the old settlement, and the residence of the founder of the female branch of the family of our host, who now only makes it his halting-place when passing to and fro between Charleston and his plantation, leaving it the year round in charge of an old servant and her grandchild. Rose-trees and flowering shrubs clustered before the porch and filled the garden in front, and the establishment gave me a good idea of a London merchant's retreat about Chelsea a hundred and fifty years ago.

At length we were ready for our journey, and, mounted in two light covered vehicles, proceeded along the sandy track, which, after a while, led us to a deep cut in the bosom of the woods, where silence was only broken by the cry of a woodpecker, the boom of a crane, or the sharp challenge of the jay. For miles we passed through the shadow of this forest, meeting only two or three vehicles, containing female planterdom on little excursions of pleasure or business, who smiled their welcome as we passed. Arrived at a deep chocolate-colored stream, called Black River, full of fish and alligators, we find a flat large enough to accommodate vehicles and passengers, and propelled by two negroes pulling upon a stretched rope, in the manner usual in the ferry-boats of Switzerland, ready for our reception.

Another drive through a more open country, and we reach a fine grove of pine and live-oak, which melts away into a shrubbery, guarded by a rustic gate-way, passing through which, we are brought by a sudden turn into the planter's house, buried in trees, which dispute with the greensward and with wild flower-beds every yard of the space which lies between the hall-door and the waters of the Pedee; and in a few minutes, as we gaze over the expanse of fields just tinged with green by the first life of the early rice crops, marked by the deep water cuts, and bounded by a fringe of unceasing forest, the chimneys of the steamer we had left at Georgetown gliding as it were through the fields indicate the existence of another navigable river still beyond.

Leaving with regret the veranda which commanded so charming a foreground, we enter the house, and are reminded by its low-browed, old-fashioned rooms, of the country houses yet to be found in parts of Ireland or on the Scottish border, with additions, made by the luxury and love of foreign travel, of more than one generation of educated Southern planters. Paintings from Italy illustrate the walls, in juxtaposition with interesting portraits of early colonial governors and their lovely womankind, limned with no uncertain hand, and full of the vigor of touch and naturalness of drapery of which Copley has left us too few exemplars; and one portrait of Benjamin West claims for itself such honor as his own pencil can give. An excellent library--filled with collections of French and English classics, and with those ponderous editions of Voltaire, Rousseau, the _mémoires pour servir_, books of travel and history such as delighted our forefathers in the last century, and many works of American and general history--affords ample occupation for a rainy day.

But, alas! these, and all things good which else the house affords, can be enjoyed but for a brief season. Just as nature has expanded every charm, developed every grace, and clothed the scene with all the beauty of opened flower, of ripening grain, and of mature vegetation, on the wings of the wind the poisoned breath comes, borne to the home of the white man, and he must fly before it or perish. The books lie unopened on their shelves, the flower blooms and dies unheeded, and, pity 'tis true, the old Madeira garnered 'neath the roof settles down for a fresh lease of life, and sets about its solitary task of acquiring a finer flavor for the infrequent lips of its banished master and his welcome visitors. This is the story, at least, that we hear on all sides, and such is the tale repeated to us beneath the porch, when the moon enhances while softening the loveliness of the scene, and the rich melody of mocking-birds fills the grove.