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CHAPTER XXVII Engedi THE QUESTION MAY OCCUR to our readers, why a retreat which appeared so easily accessible to the negroes of the vicinity in which our story is laid, should escape the vigilance of hunters. In all despotic countries, however, it will be found that the oppressed party become expert in the means of secrecy. It is also a fact that the portion of the community who are trained to labor enjoy all that advantage over the more indolent portion of it which can be given by a vigorous physical system, and great capabilities of endurance . Without a doubt, the balance of the physical strength of the South now lies in the subject race. Usage familiarizes the dwellers of the swamp with the peculiarities of their location, and gives them the advantage in it that a mountaineer has in his own mountains. Besides, they who take their life in their hand exercise their faculties with more vigor and clearness than they who have only money at stake; and this advantage the negroes had over the hunters. Dred's "strong hold of Engedi," as we have said, was isolated from the rest of the swamp by some twenty yards of deep morass, in which it was necessary to wade almost to the waist. The shore presented to the eye only the appearance of an impervious jungleof cat-brier and grape-vine rising out of the water. There was but one spot on which there was a clear space to set foot on, and that was the place where Dred crept up on the night when we first introduced the locality to our readers' attention. The hunters generally satisfied themselves with exploring more apparently accessible portions; and, unless betrayed by those to whom Dred had communicated the clue, there was very little chance that any accident would ever disclose the retreat. Dred himself appeared to be gifted with that peculiar faculty of discernment of spirits which belonged to his father, Denmark Vesey, sharpened into a preternatural intensity by the habits of his 495 496 DRED wild and dangerous life. The men he selected for trust were men as impenetrable as himself, the most vigorous in mind and body on all the plantations. The perfectness of his own religious enthusiasm, his absolute certainty that he was inspired of God, as a leader and deliverer, gave him an ascendency over the minds of those who followed him, which nothing but religious enthusiasm ever can give. And this was further confirmed by the rigid austerity of his life. For all animal comforts he appeared to entertain a profound contempt. He never tasted strong liquors in any form, and was extremely sparing in his eating; often fasting for days in succession, particularly when he had any movement of importance in contemplation. It is difficult to fathom the dark recesses of a mind so powerful and active as his, placed under a pressure of ignorance and social disability so tremendous. In those desolate regions which he made his habitation, it is said that trees often, from the singularly unnatural and wildly stimulating properties of the slimy depths from which they spring, assume a goblin growth, entirely different from their normal habit. All sorts of vegetable monsters stretch their weird, fantastic forms among its shadows. There is no principle so awful through all nature as the principle of growth. It is a mysterious and dread condition of existence, which, place it under what impediment or disadvantage you will, is constantly forcing on; and when unnatural pressure hinders it, develops in forms portentous and astonishing. The wild, dreary belt of swamp-land which girds in those states scathed by the fires of despotism is an apt emblem, in its rampant and we might say delirious exuberance of vegetation, of that darkly struggling, wildly vegetating swamp of human souls, cut off, like it, from the usages and improvements of cultivated life. Beneath that fearful pressure, souls whose energy, well-directed, might have blessed mankind, start out in preternatural and fearful developments, whose strength is only a portent of dread. The night after the meeting which we have described was one, to this singular being, of agonizing conflict. His psychological condition , as near as we can define it, seemed to be that of a human being who had been seized and possessed, after the manner related in ancient fables, by the wrath of an avenging God. That part of the moral constitution, which exists in some degree in us all...

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