in my hammock that night, overhead I heard the slow weary
draggings of the three ponderous strangers along the encumbered deck.
Their stupidity or their resolution was so great, that they never went
aside for any impediment. One ceased his movements altogether just
before the mid-watch. At sunrise I found him butted like a battering-ram
against the immovable foot of the foremast, and still striving, tooth
and nail, to force the impossible passage. That these tortoises are the
victims of a penal, or malignant, or perhaps a downright diabolical
enchanter, seems in nothing more likely than in that strange infatuation
of hopeless toil which so often possesses them. I have known them in
their journeyings ram themselves heroically against rocks, and long
abide there, nudging, wriggling, wedging, in order to displace them, and
so hold on their inflexible path. Their crowning curse is their drudging
impulse to straightforwardness in a belittered world.

Meeting with no such hinderance as their companion did, the other
tortoises merely fell foul of small stumbling-blocks--buckets, blocks,
and coils of rigging--and at times in the act of crawling over them
would slip with an astounding rattle to the deck. Listening to these
draggings and concussions, I thought me of the haunt from which they
came; an isle full of metallic ravines and gulches, sunk bottomlessly
into the hearts of splintered mountains, and covered for many miles
with inextricable thickets. I then pictured these three straight-forward
monsters, century after century, writhing through the shades, grim as
blacksmiths; crawling so slowly and ponderously, that not only did
toad-stools and all fungus things grow beneath their feet, but a sooty
moss sprouted upon their backs. With them I lost myself in volcanic
mazes; brushed away endless boughs of rotting thickets; till finally in
a dream I found myself sitting crosslegged upon the foremost, a Brahmin
similarly mounted upon either side, forming a tripod of foreheads which
upheld the universal cope.

Such was the wild nightmare begot by my first impression of the
Encantadas tortoise. But next evening, strange to say, I sat down with
my shipmates, and made a merry repast from tortoise steaks, and tortoise
stews; and supper over, out knife, and helped convert the three mighty
concave shells into three fanciful soup-tureens, and polished the three
flat yellowish calipees into three gorgeous salvers.

* *