Ye oldest inhabitants of this, or any other isle, said I, pray, give methe freedom of your three-walled towns.
The great feeling inspired by these creatures was that ofage:--dateless, indefinite endurance. And in fact that any othercreature can live and breathe as long as the tortoise of the Encantadas,I will not readily believe. Not to hint of their known capacity ofsustaining life, while going without food for an entire year, considerthat impregnable armor of their living mail. What other bodily beingpossesses such a citadel wherein to resist the assaults of Time?
As, lantern in hand, I scraped among the moss and beheld the ancientscars of bruises received in many a sullen fall among the marlymountains of the isle--scars strangely widened, swollen, halfobliterate, and yet distorted like those sometimes found in the bark ofvery hoary trees, I seemed an antiquary of a geologist, studying thebird-tracks and ciphers upon the exhumed slates trod by incrediblecreatures whose very ghosts are now defunct.
As I lay in my hammock that night, overhead I heard the slow wearydraggings of the three ponderous strangers along the encumbered deck.Their stupidity or their resolution was so great, that they never wentaside for any impediment. One ceased his movements altogether justbefore the mid-watch. At sunrise I found him butted like a battering-ramagainst the immovable foot of the foremast, and still striving, toothand nail, to force the impossible passage. That these tortoises are thevictims of a penal, or malignant, or perhaps a downright diabolicalenchanter, seems in nothing more likely than in that strange infatuationof hopeless toil which so often possesses them. I have known them intheir journeyings ram themselves heroically against rocks, and longabide there, nudging, wriggling, wedging, in order to displace them, andso hold on their inflexible path. Their crowning curse is their drudgingimpulse to straightforwardness in a belittered world.
