Chapter XXXIV: At Bundelcund Mansions (2)

When daylight came the travellers began to despair, but also to enjoy the wonderful effects of light. At 3 A.M. they had seen the morning-star spring up from behind the Median mountains, shedding a light that almost outshone the moon. An hour later, there came upon the topmost slope of the cold and ghostly snows of the cone, six thousand feet above, a flush of pink. ‘Swiftly it floated down the eastern face, and touched and kindled the rocks above us,’ says the author; ‘and then the sun flamed out, and in a moment the Araxes valley and all the hollows of the savage ridges we were crossing were flooded with overpowering light.’ At six o’clock it became evident that neither Cossacks nor Kurds would go farther. Mr Bryce then resolved to leave them, to await his return or not as they pleased, and to make the ascent of the snow-cone alone; his friend, being unequal to the exertion, agreed to wait about and look out for him at nightfall. They had now reached a height of twelve thousand feet; everything, except Little Ararat opposite, lay below them; the awful cone rose there from where they sat, its glittering snows and stern black crags of lava standing up perfectly clear in a sea of cloudless blue; tempting indeed, but awe-inspiring too, for the summit was hidden behind the nearer slopes, and no one could tell what the difficulties of the ascent might be. The Kurds and the Cossacks knew nothing, and could not tell, if they _had_ known anything on the subject.

At 8 A.M. Mr Bryce buckled on his canvas gaiters, put some meat lozenges, four hard-boiled eggs, a small flask of tea, some crusts of bread, and a lemon, into his pocket, bade his friend good-bye, and set off, accompanied, to his no small surprise, by two Cossacks (who had been much amused by the ice-axe) and one Kurd. After two hours’ climbing, only one Cossack remained with the daring mountaineer, and the courage of this worthy gave way before a terrible sheer cliff, which had to be reached by steps cut in the intervening snow. Mr Bryce bade him by signs return to the bivouac, and pressed on alone.

After two hours’ incessant toil up a straight slope of volcanic minerals, fragments of trachyte and other stones, which perpetually slipped under his foot and hand, it became a question whether the gasping climber could possibly reach the desired goal. He would not at all events give it up yet; and after a severe struggle with this decidedly bad bit, he got on to a rock rib, where he was revived by beholding a spectacle which he describes as perhaps the grandest on the whole mountain. ‘At my foot,’ he says, ‘was a deep, narrow, impassable gully, in whose bottom snow lay where the inclination was not too steep. Beyond it a line of rocky towers, red, grim, and terrible, ran right up towards the summit, its upper end lost in the clouds, through which, as at intervals they broke or shifted, one could descry, far, far above, a wilderness of snow.’

Having crossed the fissure, Mr Bryce began a tremendous climb along a slope of friable rocks which ran up till lost in clouds, and among which he was saluted by a violent sulphurous smell, which made him look for some trace of an eruptive vent, or at least for hot vapours betraying the presence of subterranean fires. Nothing of the kind is to be seen, however, and he attributes the smell to the natural decomposition of the trachytic rock, which is full of minute crystals of sulphide of iron. All the way up this rock-slope, the climber kept his eye fixed on its upper end, to see what signs there were of crags or snow-fields above. He was now thousands of feet above Little Ararat, which looked more like a broken obelisk than an independent summit twelve thousand eight hundred feet in height. ‘With mists to the left and above,’ he says, ‘and a range of black precipices cutting off all view to the right, there came a vehement sense of isolation and solitude, and I began to understand better the awe with which the mountain-silence inspires the Kurdish shepherds. Overhead, the sky had turned from dark blue to an intense bright green, a colour whose strangeness added to the weird terror of the scene.’

In another hour he must turn back, whether he should have gained the summit or not; to be overtaken by darkness upon the mountain would mean death; already he was suffering very severely from cold, and his strength was nearly exhausted. The rest must be told in his own simple forcible words: ‘At length the rock-slope came suddenly to an end, and I stepped out upon the almost level snow at the top of it, coming at the same time into the clouds, which cling to the colder surfaces.... In the thick mist the eye could pierce only some thirty yards ahead; so I walked on over the snow five or six minutes, following the rise of its surface, which was gentle, and fancying there might still be a good way to go. To mark the backward track, I trailed the point of the ice-axe along behind me in the soft snow, for there was no longer any landmark; all was closed on every side. Suddenly, to my astonishment, the ground began to fall away to the north; I stopped; a puff of wind drove off the mists on one side, the opposite side to that by which I had come, and shewed the Araxes Plain at an abysmal depth below. It was the top of Ararat.’

The traveller himself could not put into words the wonder and awe with which he was filled by the spectacle which lay before him. We can only indicate the chief features of that astonishing panorama, which included Kazbek and Elbruz, the latter two hundred and eighty miles away, and had the Caspian Sea upon its dim horizon. The mountains of Daghestan, the extinct volcano of Ala Goz, Erivan with its orchards and its vineyards, Araxes like a silver thread, the Taunus ranges and Bingol Dagh, the great Russian fortress of Alexandropol, and Kars, its enemy then, now in Russian hands. Two hundred miles away could be faintly descried the blue tops of the Assyrian mountains of Southern Kurdistan, ‘mountains that look down on Mosul and those huge mounds of Nineveh by which the Tigris flows.’ Below and around, included in this single view, seemed to lie the whole cradle of the human race, ‘from Mesopotamia in the south to the great wall of the Caucasus that covered the northern horizon, the boundary of the civilised world.’ No wonder that looking on such a scene, a solitary man should feel terrified at his own insignificance. ‘Nature,’ says the traveller, ‘sits enthroned, serenely calm, upon this hoary pinnacle, and speaks to her children only in the storm and earthquake that level their dwellings in the dust.’

No wonder the solitary man could take no heed of time until, while the eye was still unsatisfied with gazing, the curtain of mist closed again, and, says the author, ‘I was left alone in this little plain of snow, white, silent, and desolate, with a vividly bright green sky above it, and a wild west wind whistling across it, clouds girding it in, and ever and anon through the clouds glimpses of far-stretching valleys and mountains away to the world’s end.’

Mr Bryce accomplished the descent speedily and safely, reaching the encampment at six o’clock in the evening. Two days later, he and his friend went to visit the Armenian monastery of Etchmiadzin, near the northern foot of Ararat, and were presented to the Archimandrite. Here is Mr Bryce’s pithy account of the interview: ‘It came out in conversation that we had been on the mountain, and the Armenian gentleman who was acting as interpreter turned to the Archimandrite, and said: “This Englishman says he has ascended to the top of Massis (Ararat).” The venerable man smiled sweetly. “No,” he replied; “that cannot be. No one has ever been there. It is impossible.”’

LEGAL GLEANINGS.

Sticklers for their rights or fancied rights are rarely deterred from trying legal conclusions with an adversary by reason of the game not being worth the candle. In 1819 the Master of the Rolls delivered judgment in a case he described as the most difficult one he had ever been called upon to decide; a case which had been before the court for ten years, and cost each side some four thousand pounds; the matter in dispute being the ownership of a couple of perches of land of the value of ten pounds.

Not long ago a traveller by a London tram-car refused, ‘from principle,’ to pay his fare of two-pence until he arrived at the end of his journey; and a magistrate sympathising with him, dismissed the summons obtained by the Company. The latter appealed to the Court of Queen’s Bench, and got the case remitted to the police court; the upshot being that the traveller was fined one shilling, and had to pay the costs incurred by the Company, amounting to something like fifty pounds!

To pay for defeat is bad enough, but to win and yet lose by victory is certainly worse. A gentleman once spent two thousand pounds in establishing his claim to compensation for an infraction of his rights, and then was awarded one hundred and ten pounds by the assessor of the damages.—Nor, if his time was of any value to him, did a labourer, seeking to recover ten shillings from an innkeeper for refusing to supply him with refreshment, find himself the richer for invoking the aid of the law. Going into a public-house, he called for half a pint of ‘four-half,’ for which he put down his penny; but mine host refused to serve him, so that he was compelled to go farther, to a house on the opposite side of the street, where they sold beer that ‘did not suit him so well.’ For this he claimed damages in the county court, and got them, the judge giving him one shilling.—But more unfortunate was a Yorkshire wight who won his cause and two shillings damages at York assizes, but had to go to prison for his own costs.

Something said by a frank-speaking witness in a case tried by Lord Mansfield impelled his lordship to remark: ‘You have said the parish funds are often imprudently applied, and you have mentioned that you once served as churchwarden yourself. If you have no objection, I should wish to hear what was done with the money at that time?’

‘Why, my lord,’ said the farmer, ‘the money was worse applied when I was churchwarden than ever I knew it to be in my life.’

‘Indeed,’ said the judge; ‘I should be glad to know how?’

‘Well, my lord, I will tell you,’ replied the witness. ‘A gentleman left a hundred and twenty pounds to the poor of our parish. We applied for it again and again; but it wouldn’t do: the executors, the lawyers, and one and another were glad to keep the money in their hands; for you know, my lord, it is an old saying, that might can overcome right. We did not know what to do. I came to your lordship—then Counsellor Murray—for advice, and you advised us to file a bill in Chancery. We did so; and after throwing a great deal of good money after bad, we got what they call a decree; and such a decree it was, that when all expenses were paid, I reckon we were about a hundred and seventy-five pounds out of pocket. Now, my lord, I leave you to judge whether the parish money was not worse employed when I was churchwarden than ever it was before.’ Lord Mansfield thought it might have been used to better profit.

When a man makes a formal contract he should be sure it is one the law will recognise. A would-be Benedict of Hancock, Ohio, offered fifty dollars reward to any one who would procure him ‘a wife.’ Sam Wickham introduced a bewitching widow, and the wedding soon came off. Then Wickham wanted the dollars; but the happy man would not pay. His plea perhaps was that he had got a widow and not a wife. Sam brought an action for the money, and lost it, and as he paid his lawyer’s bill, solemnly abjured the wife-procuring business henceforth for evermore.—A year or two ago, one Thomas Clegg sued Charles Derrick in the Rochdale county court upon the following bill of particulars: ‘For finding a husband valued at fifty pounds, commission five per cent. per annum; two pounds ten shillings.’ The plaintiff deposed that the wife of the defendant, when a single woman, contracted with him to get her a husband, saying, she was twenty-six, not married yet, and feared she never would be; and if he would get Derrick to marry her, she would pay him five per cent. upon fifty pounds a year. He brought the pair together, and considered that the husband was bound to fulfil the wife’s agreement. But Mr Clegg learned that a contract to procure marriage between two parties for reward was altogether illegal, and could not be sustained.

As regards matrimonial contracts, the sexes are assuredly not on an equality. When Miss Roxalana Hoonan sued Mr Earle for breach of promise in a Brooklyn court, she admitted the gentleman had never promised marriage by his hand or tongue, but he had kissed her in company; and Judge Neilson told the jury that no interchange of words was necessary, ‘the gleam of the eye and the conjunction of the lips being overtures when frequent and protracted;’ and thus directed, they made the defendant pay fifteen thousand dollars for heedlessly indulging in eye-gleams and lip-conjunctions.

Extreme explicitness would seem to be required when trafficking with Frenchmen. In 1870, a lady purchased two hundred pounds’ worth of jewellery in Paris, the jeweller giving her a written promise to exchange the articles if not approved. She wore them for half-a-dozen years, and then intimated to the astonished man her desire to change them for others of newer style. He naturally demurred, arguing, as his advocate urged before the civil tribunal, that it was unreasonable that he should be called upon to accept at the price originally paid for them, trinkets that had been used constantly for six years. The court nevertheless decided that the agreement did not define the period during which the exchange might be made, and he must do his customer’s bidding. This might be law; equity it certainly was not. As we write, a case of a very similar kind has just been decided in London against Mr Streeter, the well-known jeweller, who, having promised to take back a diamond ring if not approved of, was obliged to do so, though his customer had retained it for three years.

Sharp practice is not always so successful. A gentleman took railway tickets for himself, his servants, and his horses. After the passengers were seated, it was found expedient to divide the train, the gentleman being in the first part. When the second train was about to start, the cry was ‘Tickets, please.’ The servants having none, they and the horses were turned out of their places and left behind. The gentleman sued the Company. The latter brought forward their by-law setting forth that no passenger would be allowed to enter a carriage without having first obtained a ticket, to be produced on demand. The court very properly over-ruled the plea, deciding that by delivering the tickets to the master, and not to the servants severally, the Company had contracted with him personally, and could not justify their failure to carry out the contract they had made. This was perhaps just, but we should advise that in all such cases each passenger should have possession of his own ticket.

Hood once figured in a court of law as a defendant in an action for libel, the plaintiff being Sir John Carr, author of _The Stranger in Ireland_, _The Stranger in France_, and other tedious books of travel. Appended to the poet’s _My Pocket-book, or Hints for a right merrie and conceited Tour, in Quarto, to be called the Stranger in Ireland in 1805_, was a sketch entitled ‘The Knight leaving Ireland with regret.’ This was the libel, being, as Sir John or his legal aid put it, ‘a certain false, scandalous, malicious, ridiculous, and defamatory representation of the said Sir John Carr, in the form of a man of ludicrous and ridiculous appearance, holding a pocket-handkerchief to his face, and appearing to be weeping, and also containing therein a false, malicious, and ridiculous representation of a man of ridiculous and ludicrous appearance following the said representation of the said John Carr, and loaded with and bending under the weight of three large books, and a pocket-handkerchief appearing to be held in one of the hands of the representation of a man, and the corners thereof appearing to be tied together as if containing something therein, with the printed word _wardrobe_ depending therefrom; thereby falsely and maliciously meaning and intending to represent, for the purpose of rendering the said Sir John Carr ridiculous, and exposing him to laughter, ridicule, and contempt, that one copy of the said first above-mentioned book, and two copies of the said secondly above-mentioned book, were so heavy as to cause a man to bend under the weight thereof, and that his the said Sir John Carr’s wardrobe was very small, and capable of being contained in a pocket-handkerchief.’ Spite of this precise specification of the offence committed by the pencil of the pun-loving poet, twelve good men and true failed to find that the traveller had been libelled, however much he might have been affronted.

A young man losing his wits through parental thwarting of his matrimonial aspirations, was placed in an asylum. Having occasion to leave his charge for a few minutes, the attendant forgot to lock the door upon him. The lunatic taking advantage of the oversight, slipped out of the room, made his way to an upper gallery, smashed the window, and leaped out a thirty feet fall. The shock restored his reason, but he was crippled for life; and his father brought an action against the superintendent of the asylum for compensation. The judge ruled that the superintendent could not be held guilty of neglect because his subordinate failed in his duty; and so saved the jury the trouble of assessing damages, which, supposing they set the benefit done to the patient’s mind against the injury done to his limbs, would have been a difficult matter for calculation.

Almost as difficult as that left to certain assessors appointed by the civil tribunal of Melun. The plaintiff in a case tried in that court alleged that M. de Sagonrac had ordered his gamekeeper to place snares near his land, in which ‘bats, owls and other night-birds’ were caught; in consequence of which mice and other vermin had so multiplied that his crops were spoiled. The tribunal holding that if the facts were so, the defendant would be liable, appointed three farmers to ascertain if any damage had been done to the plaintiff’s crops; whether that damage was due to animals whose presence on the land arose from the destruction of birds of prey by the defendant’s keeper; and if so, to assess the amount of the plaintiff’s loss.—A yet more puzzling suit is still at the time we write awaiting the decision of the American bench. A landslip in Shodack filled up a creek and turned the water in a different direction. The proprietor of a mill deprived of its motive-power, sues the farmer owning the land on which the slip occurred, not for damages, but to compel him to restore the stream to its former channel.

ANOTHER PARTRIDGE AND HER CHICKS.

A correspondent obliges us with the following: ‘Having read the “Story of a Partridge and her Chicks,” which appeared in your _Journal_ of October 6, 1877, I can fully concur with the writer regarding the strong attachment the partridge has for her young.

‘When spending a few holidays in the Highlands last summer, I was witness of a somewhat similar incident. Accompanying the worthy farmer with whom I was staying to the hayfield one morning, the reapers discovered a partridge sitting on her eggs right in the way of their scythes. As they could not proceed without her being removed, the farmer gently lifted her and placed the eggs one by one in his hat, to carry them to a place of safety; the poor bird meanwhile being in great distress, watching every movement with fluttering wings and palpitating heart, thinking, no doubt, we intended robbing her. No sooner had she seen the last egg safely removed, than, with a cry of delight, she flew on to his shoulder, and leaping down on the hat containing her eggs, carefully spread her feathers, and remained sitting upon them till they were placed out of all danger under one of the hayricks. On going to see how she fared in her new abode in the evening, we were greatly surprised to see her surrounded by a numerous and interesting family.

‘This bird continued about the farm all the time the brood remained by her, and at last got so tame that she would feed with the poultry. But alas! Puss made sad havoc among her chicks, only seven out of the twenty-three which were hatched coming to maturity. Whenever they got the use of their wings, they disappeared, and have probably ere this time gone the way of all flesh.’

TREASURE-TROVE.

Something I’ve found on my way
Through earth to-day;
Something of value untold,
Brighter than gold;
Something more fair than the tint
Of morning glint;
Something more sweet than the song
Of feathered throng;
Something that lovelier glows
Than queenly rose;
Something more sparkling by far
Than yon bright star;
Something I cherish—how well?
Words cannot tell.
Something—Oh, can you not guess?
Then I confess.
Some one has said ‘Love is blind;’
Yet do I find,
Deep in the heart of my Love,
My Treasure-Trove!

H. K. W.

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