The Tower of Dago

Excerpt

CHAPTER I
The Tower

As the steamer from Stralsund is approaching the Gulf of Finland, the passenger's attention is attracted by an object which projects high out of the sea. He will hear the seamen call it the Tower of Dago. An old and wealthy Englishman, he may be told, on one occasion felt impelled by curiosity to ask the captain what it would cost him to examine the ruin close at hand. The answer was clothed in language less polite than forcible: "Merely the shrivelled skin and dried-up bones you carry about with you, sir!"

For hitherto the Tower of Dago has been spared an appearance in our art galleries only by the circumstance that it cannot well be got before the painter's easel. It is built upon the outermost point of a rocky promontory of the great island of Dago. The projecting headland lies obliquely across the northern current, and the sea makes a ceaseless seething whirlpool round the obstruction. The sea-bottom all around is strewn with most perilous reefs. Among their intricate labyrinths even the skiffs of the most adroit boatmen are in danger of being dashed in pieces.

And yet, for a sight of the Tower of Dago one might well risk one's life, especially at a time when the raging storm is clothing it with all its picturesque grandeur.

The extreme ledge of the promontory is a great block of reddish-brown rock. It rises precipitously out of the dark green waves, which incessantly storm it with their foam-crested dragon-heads. Some spring-tide monster will often lash itself aloft to the very summit, frightening the seagulls and eagles that love to range themselves along the verge of the rock.

From this ledge rises a six-sided tower some hundred and fifty feet high. The lower part is built in Cyclopean fashion, of massive uncut blocks of rock. The upper portion is of red stones. These reach to the very summit of the tower, the battlements of which are to-day surmounted by the luxuriant green of juniper shrubs. And when the setting sun, bursting through a cloud, casts his rays upon the dead giant rising there in his solitude, while round about the low ashen clouds seem almost to touch his head; when the sea roars beneath and breaks in foam against his feet; when the reflected sunlight streams back, like the rays of a lighthouse, from some window the panes of which are haply still unshattered—then the glowing colossus seems a very Polyphemus, who with his one eye dares to defy the gods and wage eternal feud with men. That is the Tower of Dago.

But in perfect calm the scene is changed. Veiled in translucent mists, the tower rises aloft in grand repose beneath the hot, unclouded summer sky. Towards the summit it shows a great semi-circular gap like a mighty mouth petrified in the act of making an imprecation—a mouth gaping wide as if to salute the sea, or hail yonder craft that glides along the horizon. At ebb-tide, too, the great rock's hidden companions, the sunken reefs, begin to show themselves all around. Among them, half sunk in the sand, are seen the shattered remains of masts, rusty anchors and guns, all overgrown with seaweed and shell-fish. Here and there the eye perceives a human skull still encased in a helmet, a skeleton still protected by a shirt of mail, and innumerable remnants of stranded ships with their inscriptions and marks still readable. At one spot is seen the bottom of a vessel, whose copper plates, now hidden, now disclosed, by the restless motion of the waves, are green with verdigris. And everywhere the great sea-spiders and monster crabs—lords of the abyss—crawl and gloat unceasingly among the wreckage....