Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe - Sabine Baring-Gould (books to read to improve english TXT) 📗

to old subterranean life. Wherever he goes, wherever he succeeds in forming a "China-town," he begins to burrow and undermine the houses in which he and his fellow-countrymen live, and a labyrinth of passages and chambers is constructed, communicating with the several dwellings, so that a criminal Chinaman can rarely be trapped in the native quarter by the police. When San Francisco was burnt, the ground under the Chinese town was found to be honeycombed with runs and lurking-holes to an astounding extent.

When David had to escape from the pursuit of Saul, he fled first of all to Gath, but being recognised there, he made his way to the cave of Adullam. "And every one that was in distress, and every one that was in debt, and every one that was discontented, gathered themselves unto him, and he became a captain over them; and there were with him about four hundred men." [Footnote: 1 Sam. xxii. 1-2] In a word, he became the head of a party of freebooters, who laid the neighbourhood under contribution.

The Palestine surveyors have identified the cave of Adullam with one now called by the peasants Aid-el-Ma. It lies in a round hill about 500 feet high, pierced with a number of caverns; the hill itself being isolated by several valleys and marked by ancient ruins, tombs, and quarryings. "A cave which completes the identification exists in the hill. It is not necessary to suppose that the one used by David was of great size, for such spacious recesses are avoided by the peasantry even now, from their dampness and tendency to cause fever. Their darkness, moreover, needs many lights, and they are disliked from the numbers of scorpions and bats frequenting them. The caves used as human habitations, at least in summer, are generally about twenty or thirty paces across, lighted by the sun, and comparatively dry. I have often seen such places with their roofs blackened by smoke: families lodging in one, goats, cattle, and sheep, stabled in another, and grain or straw stored in a third. At Adullam are two such caves in the northern slope of the hill, and another further south, while the opposite sides of the tributary valley are lined with rows of caves, all smoke- blackened, and mostly inhabited, or used as pens for flocks and herds.

"The cave on the south of the hill itself was tenanted by a single family when the surveyors visited it, just as it might have been by David and his immediate friends, while his followers housed themselves in those near at hand." [Footnote: Geikie (C.), "The Holy Land and the Bible," Lond. 1887, i. p. 108.]

The haunts of the bandits in the times of Herod must have been very much like those in Dordogne. They were high up in the face of precipices in Galilee, and he was able only to subdue these gangs of freebooters by letting his soldiers down in baskets from the top of the cliffs, with machines for forcing entrance. [Footnote: Josephus, "Antiq.," xiv. 6.]

Stanley says [Footnote: "Sinai and Palestine," 1856, pp. 148-149.]: "Like all limestone formations, the hills of Palestine abound in caves. In these innumerable rents, and cavities, and holes, we see the shelter of the people of the land in those terrible visitations, as when 'Lot went up out of Zoar, and dwelt in a cave.' Or as when 'in the days of Uzziah, King of Judah, they fled before the earthquake to the ravine of the mountains;' to the rocky fissures, safer, even though themselves rent by the convulsions, than the habitations of man. We see in them, also, the hiding-places which served sometimes for the defence of robbers and insurgents, sometimes for the refuge of those of whom 'the world was not worthy;' the prototypes of the catacombs of the early Christians, of the caverns of the Vaudois and the Covenanters. The cave of the five kings at Makkedah; the 'caves, and dens, and strongholds, and 'rocks,' and 'pits,' and 'holes' in which the Israelites took shelter from the Midianites in the time of Gideon, from the Philistines in the time of Saul; the cleft of the cliff Etam, into which Samson went down to escape the vengeance of his enemies; the caves of David at Adullam and at Maon, and of Saul at Engedi; the cave in which Obadiah hid the prophets of the Lord; the caves of the robber hordes above the plain of Gennesareth; the sepulchral caves of the Gadarene demoniacs; the cave of Jotopata, where Josephus and his countrymen concealed themselves in their last struggle, continue from first to last what has been called the cave-life of the Israelite nation."

The vast grotto of Lombrive in Ariege has been already mentioned. It became a den of a band of murderous brigands at the beginning of the nineteenth century. A detachment of soldiers was sent to dislodge them in 1802; to reach the great hall access is had by crawling through a narrow passage, and here the robbers murdered as many as 146 of the soldiers, taking them one after another as they emerged from the passage, and cutting their throats. [Footnote: "Spelunca," Paris, 1905, t. vi. p. 169.] The passage now bears the name of that of _Du Crime_.

The Surtshellir in Iceland has attracted a great deal of attention, perhaps because it is so different from other caves, being formed in the lava. Its origin is very easily explained. At a great eruption of lava from a neighbouring crater, the crust hardened rapidly whilst the viscid current below continued to flow, and this latter flowed on till it also became rigid, and left a great gap between it and the original crust. I visited it in 1860. It has several branches, and in it lie pools perpetually frozen. There are gaps here and there in the roof through which rays of light penetrate, and also snow that heaps itself on the floor. In one side-chamber is a great accumulation of sheep- bones. In the thirteenth century a band of twenty-four robbers took up their abode in this cavern, and made excursions in all directions around, robbing farmhouses, and driving away sheep. When this had gone on for some time the bonders united and succeeded in surrounding the gang, and killing eighteen of them. The six who escaped fled to the snow mountains, and were never heard of again. Now the strange thing is, how could the men live through a winter in this horrible cavern with a floor of ice in many places, and with a temperature below freezing even in summer? Fuel they could not procure, as there are but black sandy moors around that grow nothing but dwarf willow, and that is so scarce as to be inefficient for their purpose. They must have supplied themselves with light and heat by the tallow of the sheep they killed, run into a lamp. This is the only heating fuel used at present by the Icelanders, apart from the animal heat they give out in the closely sealed common room they occupy as sleeping quarters as well as dining-room and workshop. It may be vastly pleasant in theory to live at other people's expense, but it has its drawbacks, and in this instance _le jeu ne valait pas la chandelle_.

In Pitscottie's "Chronicles of Scotland," and in Holinshed's "Scottish Chronicle," at the end of the reign of James II. there is a story of a brigand who is said to have lived in a den called Feruiden, or Ferride's Den, in Angus, who was burnt along with his wife and family for cannibalism, the youngest daughter alone was spared as she was but a twelvemonth old. But when she grew up she was convicted of the same crime, and was condemned to be burnt or buried alive.

I have given elsewhere a very full account of the cave--a den of robbers beside which that to which Gil Blas was carried was a paradise --La Crouzate on the Causse de Gramat in the Department of Lot. I will therefore here mention it but superficially. At the entrance are notches in the rock, showing that at one time it was closed by a door. A rapid descent is suddenly brought to a standstill by an opening in the floor of a veritable _oubliette_, and this opening is crossed only by a bridge of poles, the hand helping to maintain the balance by pressing against the wall of rock on the right hand. Then comes a second hollow, but not so serious, and then a third that can only be descended by a ladder. This opens into a hall in the midst of which yawns a horrible chasm, across which lies a rough bridge of poles that give access to some small chambers beyond, which had formerly been tenanted by the brigands who had their lair in this cavern. Notches in the walls of the well show that across it were laid poles that sustained a pulley, by means of which a bucket could be let down to the well 265 feet, for water. My cousin, Mr. George Young, actually found remains of the crane employed for the purpose at the bottom of the well. About the year 1864, M. Delpons, prefect of the Department of Lot, observing a huge block of limestone lying in a field near La Crouzate, had it raised, and discovered beneath it twelve skeletons ranged in a circle, their feet inwards, and an iron chain linking them together; probably the remains of the bandits who made of La Crouzate their den, whence they issued to rob in the neighbourhood. According to the local tradition, the peasants of the surrounding country paid a poll-tax for every sheep and ox they possessed so as to raise a levee which should sweep the Causse of these marauders, and it was due to this effort that the band was captured and every member of it hung to the branches of the walnut tree beneath which lies the broad stone.

At Gargas, near Montzejeau, in Hautes Pyrenees, is a prehistoric cavern of considerable extent. In it have been found sealed up in stalagmite the remains of primitive man. Now the significant fact exists that just ten years before the outbreak of the French Revolution this cave was inhabited by Blaise Ferrage, a stone-mason, who at the age of twenty- two deliberately threw aside his trade and retired into the grotto, whence he sallied forth to seize, murder, and eat children and young girls. Men also he shot, strangled, or stabbed, and dragged to his lair, there to devour their carcases.

For three years this monster terrorized the countryside. The number of his victims was innumerable. As last he was caught and broken on the wheel in December 1782. There is no evidence that the naked prehistoric men who had inhabited the cave of Gargas were cannibals.

That the outlaw and he who has dropped out of the ranks of ordered social life, and he who seeks to prey on civilised society should naturally, instinctively, make the cave his home, is what we might expect. He is reverting to the habits of early man whose hand was against every man.

In the "Two Gentlemen of Verona," the outlaws are presented as living in a cave. The robbers in "Gil Blas" had their lair also in one.

One of the finest and most pathetic of Icelandic Sagas is the history of Grettir the Outlaw, who was born in 997, and killed by his enemies in 1031. He spent nineteen years in outlawry in Iceland, and outlawry there in that terrible climate, with no house to cover his head, would seem an ordeal impossible for human endurance. Between the autumn of 1022 and the spring of 1024, that is to say during two winters, he