The floor, thick with a fine brown dust
mingled with shining specks of decomposed granite, and dimpled with
hundreds of pitfalls of the ant-lion, slopes upward. It is cool, and a
dry, secure spot. Not even the torrential rains of many decades of wet
seasons have damped the floor. One feels as though he were disturbing
the dust of ages; when sitting back to admire the decorated ceiling, he
necessarily imprints patterns which are the replicas of those made by
flesh and bone long since numbered among the anonymous dead.
The sea laves the hot rocks 600 feet below, and booms and gobbles in the
cool crevices; but up here the outlook is obscured by rocks and giant
trees, and an artistic soul, longing for some method of expression,
might serenely gratify itself in accordance with its lights--crude though
they were. Here, at the entrance, lie a couple of charred sticks,
significant of the last fire of the artist, which smouldered out perhaps
half a century ago. On the very doorstep is a disc of pearl-shell, the
discarded beginning of a fish-hook. These relics give to the scene a
pathetic interest. As I looked at them ponderingly, a frog far in the
back of the cave gave a discordant, echoing croak, which started the
sulky and suspicious black boy who attended me into an abrupt
exclamation of semi-fright; while a scrub fowl, scratching for its living
overhead, dislodged a chip of granite which went clicking down the
rocks.
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