Chapter III: Front Matter (3)

Night squally and rainy--morning ditto--we weigh, however, and return towards Staffa, and, very happily, the day clears as we approach the isle. As we ascertained the situation of the cave, I shall only make this memorandum, that when the weather will serve, the best landing is to the lee of Booshala, a little conical islet or rock, composed of basaltic columns placed in an oblique or sloping position. In this way, you land at once on the flat causeway, formed by the heads of truncated pillars, which leads to the cave. But if the state of tide renders it impossible to land under Booshala, then take one of the adjacent creeks; in which case, keeping to the left hand along the top of the ledge of rocks which girdles in the isle, you find a dangerous and precipitous descent to the causeway aforesaid, from the table. Here we were under the necessity of towing our Commodore, Hamilton, whose gallant heart never fails him, whatever the tenderness of his toes may do. He was successfully lowered by a rope down the precipice, and proceeding along the flat terrace or causeway already mentioned, we reached the celebrated cave. I am not sure whether I was not more affected by this second, than by the first view of it. The stupendous columnar side walls--the depth and strength of the ocean with which the cavern is filled--the variety of tints formed by stalactites dropping and petrifying between the pillars, and resembling a sort of chasing of yellow or cream-coloured marble filling the interstices of the roof--the corresponding variety below, where the ocean rolls over a red, and in some places a violet-coloured rock, the basis of the basaltic pillars--the dreadful noise of those august billows so well corresponding with the grandeur of the scene--are all circumstances elsewhere unparalleled. We have now seen in our voyage the three grandest caverns in Scotland,--Smowe, Macallister’s Cave, and Staffa; so that, like the Troglodytes of yore, we may be supposed to know something of the matter. It is, however, impossible to compare scenes of natures so different, nor, were I compelled to assign a preference to any of the three, could I do it but with reference to their distinct characters, which might affect different individuals in different degrees. The characteristic of the Smowe cave may in this case be called the terrific, for the difficulties which oppose the stranger are of a nature so uncommonly wild, as, for the first time at least, to convey an impression of terror--with which the scenes to which he is introduced fully correspond. On the other hand the dazzling whiteness of the incrustations in Macallister’s Cave, the elegance of the entablature, the beauty of its limpid pool, and the graceful dignity of its arch, render its leading features those of severe and chastened beauty. Staffa, the third of these subterranean wonders, may challenge sublimity as its principal characteristic. Without the savage gloom of the Smowe cave, and investigated with more apparent ease, though, perhaps, with equal real danger, the stately regularity of its columns forms a contrast to the grotesque imagery of Macallister’s Cave, combining at once the sentiments of grandeur and beauty. The former is, however, predominant, as it must necessarily be in any scene of the kind.

We had scarce left Staffa when the wind and rain returned.

_Lockhart, Life of Sir Walter Scott_ (Edinburgh, 1878).

FOOTNOTES:

[2]

“----that wondrous dome,
Where, as to shame the temples deck’d
By skill of earthly architect,
Nature herself, it seem’d, would raise,
A minster to her Maker’s praise!
Not for a meaner use ascend
Her columns, or her arches bend;
Nor of a theme less solemn tells
That mighty surge that ebbs and swells,
And still, beneath each awful pause
From the high vault an answer draws,
In varied tone prolonged and high
That mocks the organ’s melody.
Nor doth its entrance front in vain
To old Iona’s holy fane,
That Nature’s voice might seem to say,
‘Well hast thou done, frail Child of clay!
Thy humble powers that stately shrine
Task’d high and hard--but witness mine!’”

_Lord of the Isles._ Canto IV. St. 10.

[3] _Ode on the Superstitions of the Highlands._

FINGAL’S CAVE

(_SCOTLAND_)

JOHN KEATS

I am puzzled how to give you an Idea of Staffa. It can only be represented by a first-rate drawing. One may compare the surface of the Island to a roof--this roof is supported by grand pillars of basalt standing together as thick as honeycombs. The finest thing is Fingal’s Cave--it is entirely a hollowing out of Basalt Pillars. Suppose now the Giants who rebelled against Jove had taken a whole Mass of black Columns and bound them together like bunches of matches--and then with immense axes had made a cavern in the body of these columns---- Of course the roof and floor must be composed of broken ends of the Columns--such is Fingal’s Cave, except that the Sea has done the work of excavations, and is continually dashing there--so that we walk along the sides of the cave on the pillars which are left as if for convenient stairs. The roof is arched somewhat gothic-wise, and the length of some of the entire side-pillars is fifty feet. About the island you might seat an army of Men each on a pillar. The length of the cave is 120 feet, and from its extremity the view into the sea, through the large Arch at the entrance--the colour of the columns is a sort of black with a lurking gloom of purple therein. For solemnity and grandeur it far surpasses the finest Cathedral. At the extremity of the Cave there is a small perforation into another cave, at which the waters meeting and buffeting each other there is sometimes produced a report as of a cannon heard as far as Iona, which must be twelve Miles. As we approached in the boat, there was such a fine swell of the sea that the pillars appeared rising immediately out of the crystal. But it is impossible to describe it--

Not Aladdin magian
Ever such a work began.
Not the Wizard of the Dee
Ever such a dream could see,
Not St. John in Patmos Isle
In the passion of his toil
When he saw the churches seven
Golden-aisled built up in heaven
Gaz’d at such a rugged wonder.
As I stood its roofing under
Lo! I saw one sleeping there
On the marble cold and bare.
While the surges wash’d his feet
And his garments white did beat
Drench’d about the sombre rocks,
On his neck his well-grown locks
Lifted dry above the Main
Were upon the curl again--
“What is this? and what art thou?”
Whisper’d I, and touch’d his brow;
“What art thou? and what is this?”
Whisper’d I, and strove to kiss
The Spirit’s hand, to wake his eyes;
Up he started in a trice:
“I am Lycidas,” said he
“Fam’d in funeral Minstrelsy--
This was architected thus
By the great Oceanus.
Here his mighty waters play
Hollow Organs all the day,
Here, by turns, his dolphins all,
Finny palmers great and small,
Come to pay devotion due--
Each a mouth of pearls must strew!
Many a mortal of these days
Dares to pass our sacred ways,
Dares to touch, audaciously
This Cathedral of the sea--
I have been the Pontiff-priest,
Where the Waters never rest,
Where a fledgy sea-bird choir
Soars for ever--holy fire
I have hid from Mortal Man.
Proteus is my Sacristan
But the stupid eye of Mortal
Hath pass’d beyond the Rocky portal,
So for ever will I leave
Such a taint and soon unweave
All the magic of the place--
’Tis now free to stupid face--
To cutters and to fashion boats,
To cravats and Petticoats.
The great Sea shall war it down,
For its fame shall not be blown
At every farthing quadrille dance.”
So saying with a Spirit’s glance
He dived--

I am sorry I am so indolent as to write such stuff as this. It can’t be helped. The western coast of Scotland is a most strange place--it is composed of rocks, mountains, mountainous and rocky islands intersected by lochs--you can go but a short distance anywhere from salt water in the highlands.

_Letters of John Keats_ (London and New York, 1891).

IN THE HIMALAYAS

(_INDIA_)

G. W. STEEVENS

In Calcutta they grumbled that the hot weather was beginning already. Mornings were steamy, days sticky, and the municipal impurities rose rankly. The carter squatted over his bullocks with his shining body stark naked but for a loin-cloth.

At Siliguri, the bottom of the ascent to Darjiling, the rough grass and the tea-gardens were sheeted at sunrise in a silver frost. What few natives appeared happed their heads in shawls as if they had toothache.

It takes you an afternoon and a night to get as far as Siliguri. What you principally notice on the way is the dullness of the flat, moist richness of Bengal, and the extraordinary fullness of the first-class carriages. Even at this winter season the residents of Calcutta snatch at the chance of being cold for twenty-four hours. When you get out of your carriage at the junction station, you see on the other side of the platform a dumpy little toy train--a train at the wrong end of a telescope with its wheels cut from beneath it. Engines and trucks and carriages seem to be crawling like snakes on their bellies. Six miniature easy-chairs, three facing three, on an open truck with an awning, make a first-class carriage.

This is the Darjiling-Himalaya Railway--two-foot gauge, climbing four feet to the hundred for fifty miles up the foothills of the greatest mountains in the world. It is extraordinary as the only line in India that has been built with Indian capital. But you will find that the least of its wonders. A flat-faced hillman bangs with a hammer twice three times on a spare bit of railway metal hung up by way of a gong, the whistle screams, and you pant away on surely the most entrancing railway journey in the world. Nothing very much to make your heart jump in the first seven miles. You bowl along the surface of a slightly ascending cart-load, and your view is mostly bamboo and tea. Graceful enough, and cool to the eye--the bamboos, hedges or clumps of slender stem with plumes of pale leaf swinging and nodding above them; the tea, trim ranks and files of short, well-furnished bushes with lustrous, dark-green leaves, not unlike evergreens or myrtle in a nursery at home,--but you soon feel that you have known bamboo and tea all your life. Then suddenly you begin to climb, and all at once you are in a new world--a world of plants.

A new world is easy to say, but this is new indeed and a very world--such a primeval vegetable world as you have read of in books and eked out with dreams. It has everything you know in your world, only everything expressed in vegetation. It is a world in its variety alone. Trees of every kind rise up round you at every angle--unfamiliar, most of them, and exaggerations of forms you know, as if they were seen through a microscope. You might come on such broad fleshy leaves by way of Jack’s giant bean-stalk. Other growths take the form of bushes as high as our trees; but beside them are skinny, stunted starvelings, such as the most niggardly country might show. Then there are grasses--tufted, ruddy bamboo grass, and huge yellow straws with giant bents leaning insolently over to flick your face as you go by. Smaller still grow the ferns, lurking shyly in the crevices of the banks. And over everything, most luxuriant of everything, crawl hundred-armed creepers, knitting and knotting the whole jungle into one mellay of struggling life.

The varieties--the trees and shrubs and grasses and ferns and creepers--you would see in any tropical garden; but you could not see them at home. You could not see them in their unpruned native intercourse one with the other. The rise and fall of the ground, the whims of light and air, coax them into shapes that answer to the most fantastic imagination. Now you are going through the solemn aisles of a great cathedral--grey trunks for columns, with arches and vaulted roofs of green, with dark, retreating chapels and altar-trappings of mingled flowers. Now it is a king’s banqueting-hall, tapestried with white-flowering creeper and crimson and purple bougainvillea; overhead the scarlet-mahogany blossoms of a sparse-leaved tulip-tree might be butterflies frescoed on a ceiling.

Fancy can compel the wilderness into moments of order, but wild it remains. The growths are not generally buildings, but animate beings in a real world. You see no perfectly shaped tree, as in a park or garden; one is warped, another stunted, another bare below--each formed, like men, by the pressure of a thousand fellows. Here is a corpse spreading white, stark arms abroad. Here are half-a-dozen young creatures rolling over each other like puppies at play. And there is a creeper flinging tumultuous, enraptured arms round a stately tree; presently it is gripping it in thick bands like Laocöon’s serpent, then choking it mercilessly to death, then dead itself, its bleached, bare streamers dangling limply in the wind. It is life, indeed, this forest--plants fighting, victorious and vanquished; loving and getting children; springing and waxing and decaying and dying--our own world of men translated into plants.

While I am spinning similitudes, the Darjiling-Himalaya Railway is panting always upwards, boring through the thick world of trees like a mole. Now it sways round a curve so short that you can almost look back into the next carriage, and you understand why the wheels are so low. Now it stops dead, and almost before it stops starts backwards up a zigzag, then forwards up another, and on again. In a moment it is skating on the brink of a slide of shale that trembles to come down and overwhelm it; next it is rumbling across a bridge above the point it passed ten minutes ago, and also that which it will reach ten minutes hence. Twisting, backing, circling, dodging, but always rising, it untreads the skein whose end is in the clouds and the snows.

Presently the little engine draws quite clear of the jungle. You skirt opener slopes, and the blue plain below is no longer a fleeting vista, but a broad prospect. You see how the forest spills itself on to the fields and spreads into a dark puddle over their lightness. You see a great river overlaying the dimness with a ribbon of steel. The ferns grow thicker about you; gigantic fronds bow at you from gullies overhead, and you see the tree-fern--a great crown of drooping green on a trunk of a man’s height--standing superbly alone, knowing its supreme gracefulness. Next, as you rise and rise, the air gets sharp; through a gauzy veil of mist appear again huge forests, but dark and gloomy with brown moss dripping dankly from every branch. Rising, rising, and you have now come to Ghoom, the highest point. Amid the cold fog appears the witch of Ghoom--a hundred years old, with a pointed chin and mop of grizzled hair all witch-fashion, but beaming genially and requesting backsheesh.

Then round a corner--and here is Darjiling. A scattered settlement on a lofty ridge, facing a great cup enclosed by other ridges--mountains elsewhere, here hills. Long spurs run down into the hollow, half black with forest, half pale and veined with many paths. At the bottom is a little chequer of fresh green millet; the rim at the top seems to line the sky.

And the Himalayas and the eternal snows? The devil a Himalaya in sight. Thick vapours dip down and over the very rim of the cup; beyond Darjiling is a tumult of peaked creamy cloud. You need not be told it,--clouds that hide mountains always ape their shapes,--the majestic Himalayas are behind that screen, and you will not see them to-day, nor perhaps to-morrow, nor yet for a fortnight of to-morrows.

You must console yourself with Darjiling and the hillmen. And Darjiling is pleasant to the eye as you look down on it, a huddle of grey corrugated-iron roofs, one stepping over the other, hugging the hillside with one or two red ones to break the monotone. There is no continuous line of them: each stands by itself in a ring of deep green first. The place is cool and grateful after an Indian town--clean and roomy, a place of homes and not of pens.

In the middle of it is the bazaar, and my day, by luck, was market-day. Here, again, you could never fancy yourself in India. A few Hindus there are, but beside the dumpy hillmen their thin limbs, tiny features, and melting eyes seem hardly human. More like the men you know is the Tibetan, with a long profile and long, sharp nose, though his hat has the turned-up brim of the Chinese, though he wears a long bottle-green dressing-gown open to the girdle, and his pigtail knocks at the back of his knees. But the prevailing type, though as Mongolian, is far more genial than the Tibetan. Squat little men, for the most part, fill the bazaar, with broad faces that give room for the features, with button noses, and slits for eyes. They wear boots and putties, or gaiters made of many-coloured carpet-bagging; and their women are like them--with shawls over their heads, and broad sashes swathing them from bosom to below the waist, with babies slung behind their backs, not astride on the hip as are the spawn of India. Their eyes are black as sloes--puckered, too, but seeming puckered with laughter; and their clear yellow skins are actually rosy on the cheeks, like a ripe apricot. Square-faced, long-pigtailed, plump, cheery, open of gaze, and easy of carriage, rolling cigarettes, and offering them to soothe babies--they might not be beautiful in Europe; here they are ravishing.

But you come to Darjiling to see the snows. So on a night of agonizing cold--feet and hands a block of ice the moment you cease to move them--must follow a rise before it is light. Maybe the clouds will be kinder this morning. No; the same stingy, clammy mist,--only there, breaking through it, high up in the sky--yes, there are a few faint streaks of white. Just a few marks of snow scored on the softer white of the cloud, chill with the utterly disconsolate cold of ice through a window of fog. Still, there are certainly Himalayas there.

Up and up I toiled; the sun was plainly rising behind the ridge of Darjiling. In the cup below the sunlight was drawing down the hillsides and peeling off the twilight. Then, at a sudden turn of the winding ascent, I saw the summit of Kinchinjunga. Just the summit, poised in the blue, shining and rejoicing in the sunrise. And as I climbed and climbed, other peaks rose into sight below and beside him, all dazzling white, mounting and mounting the higher I mounted, every instant more huge and towering and stately, boring into the sky.

Up--till I came to the summit, and the sun appeared--a golden ball swimming in a sea of silver. He was sending the clouds away curling before him; they drifted across the mountains, but he pursued and smote and dissolved them. And ever the mountains rose and rose, huger and huger; as they swelled up they heaved the clouds away in rolls off their shoulders. Now their waists were free, and all but their feet. Only a chasm of fog still hid their lower slopes. Fifty miles away, they looked as if I could toss a stone across to them; only you could never hope to hit their heads, they towered so gigantically. Now the clouds, clearing to right and left, laid bare a battlemented range of snow-white wall barring the whole horizon. Behind these appeared other peaks; it was not a range, but a country of mountains, not now a wall, but a four-square castle carved by giants out of eternal ice. It was the end of the world--a sheer rampart, which forbade the fancy of anything beyond.

And in the centre, by peak and col and precipice, the prodigy reared itself up to Kinchinjunga. Bare rock below, then blinding snow seamed with ridges of chimneys, and then, above, the mighty summit--a tremendous three-cornered slab of grey granite between two resplendent faces of snow. Other mountains tiptoe at the sky snatch at it with a peak like a needle. Kinchinjunga heaves himself up into it, broadly, massively, and makes his summit a diadem. He towers without effort, knowing his majesty. Sublime and inviolable, he lifts his grey nakedness and his mail of burnished snow, and turns his forehead serenely to sun and storm. Only their touch, of all things created, has perturbed his solitude since the birth of time.

_In India_ (New York, 1899).

NIAGARA FALLS

(_NORTH AMERICA_)

ANTHONY TROLLOPE

It has been said that it matters much from what point the Falls are first seen, but to this I demur. It matters, I think, very little, or not at all. Let the visitor first see it all, and learn the whereabouts of every point, so as to understand his own position and that of the waters; and then having done that in the way of business let him proceed to enjoyment. I doubt whether it be not the best to do this with all sight-seeing. I am quite sure that it is the way in which acquaintance may be best and most pleasantly made with a new picture. The Falls are, as I have said, made by a sudden breach in the level of the river. All cataracts are, I presume, made by such breaches; but generally the waters do not fall precipitously as they do at Niagara, and never elsewhere, as far as the world yet knows, has a breach so sudden been made in such a body of water. Up above the Falls, for more than a mile, the waters leap and burst over rapids, as though conscious of the destiny that awaits them. Here the river is very broad, and comparatively shallow, but from shore to shore it frets itself into little torrents, and begins to assume the majesty of its power. Looking at it even here, one feels sure that no strongest swimmer could have a chance of saving himself, if fate had cast him in even among those petty whirlpools. The waters, though so broken in their descent, are deliciously green. This colour as seen early in the morning, or just as the sun has set, is so bright as to give to the place of its chiefest charms.

This will be best seen from the further end of the island--Goat Island, as it is called, which, as the reader will understand, divides the river immediately above the Falls. Indeed the island is a part of that precipitously broken ledge over which the river tumbles; and no doubt in process of time will be worn away and covered with water. The time, however, will be very long. In the meanwhile it is perhaps a mile round, and is covered thickly with timber. At the upper end of the island the waters are divided, and coming down in two courses, each over its own rapids, form two separate falls. The bridge by which the island is entered is a hundred yards or more above the smaller fall. The waters here have been turned by the island, and make their leap into the body of the river below at a right angle with it,--about two hundred yards below the greater fall. Taken alone this smaller cataract would, I imagine, be the heaviest fall of water known, but taken in conjunction with the other it is terribly shorn of its majesty. The waters here are not green as they are at the larger cataract, and though the ledge has been hollowed and bowed by them so as to form a curve, that curve does not deepen itself into a vast abyss as it does at the horseshoe up above. This smaller fall is again divided, and the visitor passing down a flight of steps and over a frail wooden bridge finds himself on a smaller island in the midst of it.

But we will go at once on to the glory, and the thunder, and the majesty, and the wrath of that upper hell of waters. We are still, let the reader remember, on Goat Island, still in the States, and on what is called the American side of the main body of the river. Advancing beyond the path leading down to the lesser fall, we come to that point of the island at which the waters of the main river begin to descend. From hence across to the Canadian side the cataract continues itself in one unabated line. But the line is very far from being direct or straight. After stretching for some little way from the shore, to a point in the river which is reached by a wooden bridge at the end of which stands a tower upon the rock,--after stretching to this, the line of the ledge bends inwards against the flood,--in, and in, and in, till one is led to think that the depth of that horseshoe is immeasurable. It has been cut with no stinting hand. A monstrous cantle has been worn back out of the centre of the rock, so that the fury of the waters converges, and the spectator as he gazes into the hollow with wishful eyes fancies that he can hardly trace out the centre of the abyss.

Go down to the end of that wooden bridge, seat yourself on the rail, and there sit till all the outer world is lost to you. There is no grander spot about Niagara than this. The waters are absolutely around you. If you have that power of eye-control, which is so necessary to the full enjoyment of scenery, you will certainly see nothing but the water. You will certainly hear nothing else; and the sound, I beg you to remember, is not an ear-cracking, agonizing crash and clang of noises; but is melodious and soft withal, though loud as thunder. It fills your ears, and as it were envelops them, but at the same time you can speak to your neighbour without an effort. But at this place, and in these moments, the less of speaking I should say the better. There is no grander spot than this. Here, seated on the rail of the bridge, you will not see the whole depth of the fall. In looking at the grandest works of nature, and of art too, I fancy, it is never well to see all. There should be something left to the imagination, and much should be half-concealed in mystery. The greatest charm of a mountain range is the wild feeling that there must be strange desolate worlds in those far-off valleys beyond. And so here, at Niagara, that converging rush of waters may fall down, down at once into a hell of rivers for what the eye can see. It is glorious to watch them in their first curve over the rocks. They come green as a bank of emeralds; but with a fitful flying colour, as though conscious that in one moment more they would be dashed into spray and rise into air, pale as driven snow. The vapour rises high into the air, and is gathered there, visible always as a permanent white cloud over the cataract; but the bulk of the spray which fills the lower hollow of that horseshoe is like a tumult of snow. This you will not fully see from your seat on the rail. The head of it rises ever and anon out of the caldron below, but the caldron itself will be invisible. It is ever so far down,--far as your own imagination can sink it. But your eyes will rest full upon the curve of the waters. The shape you will be looking at is that of a horseshoe, but of a horseshoe miraculously deep from toe to heel;--and this depth becomes greater as you sit there. That which at first was only great and beautiful, becomes gigantic and sublime till the mind is at loss to find an epithet for its own use. To realize Niagara you must sit there till you see nothing else than that which you have come to see. You will hear nothing else, and think of nothing else. At length you will be at one with the tumbling river before you. You will find yourself among the waters as though you belonged to them. The cool liquid green will run through your veins, and the voice of the cataract will be the expression of your own heart. You will fall as the bright waters fall, rushing down into your new world with no hesitation and with no dismay; and you will rise again as the spray rises, bright, beautiful, and pure. Then you will flow away in your course to the uncompassed, distant, and eternal ocean.

And now we will cross the water, and with this object will return by the bridge out of Goat Island on the mainland of the American side. But as we do so let me say that one of the great charms of Niagara consists in this,--that over and above that one great object of wonder and beauty, there is so much little loveliness;--loveliness especially of water, I mean. There are little rivulets running here and there over little falls, with pendent boughs above them, and stones shining under their shallow depths. As the visitor stands and looks through the trees the rapids glitter before him, and then hide themselves behind islands. They glitter and sparkle in far distances under the bright foliage till the remembrance is lost, and one knows not which way they run.

Close to the cataract, exactly at the spot from whence in former days the Table Rock used to project from the land over the boiling caldron below, there is now a shaft down which you will descend to the level of the river, and pass between the rock and the torrent. This Table Rock broke away from the cliff and fell, as up the whole course of the river the seceding rocks have split and fallen from time to time through countless years, and will continue to do till the bed of the upper lake is reached. You will descend this shaft, taking to yourself or not taking to yourself a suit of oil-clothes as you may think best.

In the spot to which I allude the visitor stands on a broad safe path, made of shingles, between the rock over which the water rushes. He will go in so far that the spray rising back from the bed of the torrent does not incommode him. With this exception, the further he can go in the better; but circumstances will clearly show him the spot to which he should advance. Unless the water be driven in by a strong wind, five yards make the difference between a comparatively dry coat and an absolutely wet one. And then let him stand with his back to the entrance, thus hiding the last glimmer of the expiring day. So standing he will look up among the falling waters, or down into the deep misty pit, from which they reascend in almost as palpable a bulk. The rock will be at his right hand, high and hard, and dark and straight, like the wall of some huge cavern, such as children enter in their dreams. For the first five minutes he will be looking but at the waters of a cataract,--at the waters, indeed, of such a cataract as we know no other, and at their interior curves which elsewhere we cannot see. But by and by all this will change. He will no longer be on a shingly path beneath a waterfall; but that feeling of a cavern wall will grow upon him, of a cavern deep, below roaring seas, in which the waves are there, though they do not enter in upon him; or rather not the waves, but the very bowels of the ocean. He will feel as though the floods surrounded him, coming and going with their wild sounds, and he will hardly recognize that though among them he is not in them. And they, as they fall with a continual roar, not hurting the ear, but musical withal, will seem to move as the vast ocean waters may perhaps move in their internal currents. He will lose the sense of one continued descent, and think that they are passing round him in their appointed courses. The broken spray that rises from the depth below, rises so strongly, so palpably, so rapidly, that the motion in every direction will seem equal. And, as he looks on, strange colours will show themselves through the mist; the shades of grey will become green or blue, with ever and anon a flash of white; and then, when some gust of wind blows in with greater violence, the sea-girt cavern will become all dark and black. Oh, my friend, let there be no one there to speak to thee then; no, not even a brother. As you stand there speak only to the waters.

_North America_ (London, 1862).

NIAGARA FALLS

(_NORTH AMERICA_)

CHARLES DICKENS

We called at the town of Erie, at eight o’clock that night, and lay there an hour. Between five and six next morning, we arrived at Buffalo, where we breakfasted; and being too near the Great Falls to wait patiently anywhere else, we set off by the train, the same morning at nine o’clock, to Niagara.

It was a miserable day; chilly and raw; a damp mist falling; and the trees in that northern region quite bare and wintry. Whenever the train halted, I listened for the roar; and was constantly straining my eyes in the direction where I knew the Falls must be, from seeing the river rolling on towards them; every moment expecting to behold the spray. Within a few moments of our stopping, not before, I saw two great white clouds rising up slowly and majestically from the depths of the earth. That was all. At length we alighted; and then for the first time, I heard the mighty rush of water, and felt the ground tremble underneath my feet.

The bank is very steep, and was slippery with rain, and half-melted ice. I hardly know how I got down, but I was soon at the bottom, and climbing, with two English officers who were crossing and had joined me, over some broken rocks, deafened by the noise, half-blinded by the spray, and wet to the skin. We were at the foot of the American Fall. I could see an immense torrent of water tearing headlong down from some great height, but had no idea of shape, or situation, or anything but vague immensity.

When we were seated in the little ferry-boat, and were crossing the swollen river immediately before both cataracts, I began to feel what it was--but I was in a manner stunned, and unable to comprehend the vastness of the scene. It was not until I came on Table Rock, and looked--Great Heaven, on what a fall of bright green water!--that it came upon me in its full might and majesty.

Then, when I felt how near to my Creator I was standing, the first effect, and the enduring one--instant and lasting--of the tremendous spectacle, was Peace. Peace of Mind, tranquillity, calm recollections of the Dead, great thoughts of Eternal Rest and Happiness: nothing of gloom or terror. Niagara was at once stamped upon my heart, an Image of Beauty; to remain there, changeless and indelible, until its pulses cease to beat, for ever.

Oh, how the strife and trouble of daily life receded from my view, and lessened in the distance, during the ten memorable days we passed on that Enchanted Ground! What voices spoke from out the thundering water; what faces, faded from the earth, looked out upon me from its gleaming depths; what Heavenly promise glistened in those angels’ tears, the drops of many hues, that showered around, and twined themselves about the gorgeous arches which the changing rainbows made!

I never stirred in all that time from the Canadian side, whither I had gone at first. I never crossed the river again; for I knew there were people on the other shore, and in such a place it is natural to shun strange company. To wander to and fro all day, and see the cataracts from all points of view; to stand upon the edge of the great Horse-Shoe Fall, marking the hurried water gathering strength as it approached the verge, yet seeming too, to pause before it shot into the gulf below; to gaze from the river’s level up at the torrent as it came streaming down; to climb the neighbouring heights and watch it through the trees, and see the wreathing water in the rapids hurrying on to take its fearful plunge; to linger in the shadow of the solemn rocks three miles below; watching the river as, stirred by no visible cause, it heaved and eddied and awoke the echoes, being troubled yet, far down beneath its surface, by its giant leap; to have Niagara before me, lighted by the sun and by the moon, red in the day’s decline, and grey as evening slowly fell upon it; to look upon it every day, and wake up in the night and hear its ceaseless voice: this was enough.

I think in every quiet season now, still do those waters roll and leap, and roar and tumble, all day long; still are the rainbows spanning them, a hundred feet below. Still, when the sun is on them, do they shine and glow like molten gold. Still, when the day is gloomy, do they fall like snow, or seem to crumble away like the front of a great chalk cliff, or roll down the rock like dense white smoke. But always does the mighty stream appear to die as it comes down, and always from its unfathomable grave arises that tremendous ghost of spray and mist which is never laid: which has haunted this place with the same dread solemnity since Darkness brooded on the deep, and that first flood before the Deluge--Light--came rushing on Creation at the word of God.

_American Notes for General Circulation_ (London, 1842).

FUJI-SAN

(_JAPAN_)

SIR EDWIN ARNOLD

I have just made in the company of Captain John Ingles, R. N., Naval Adviser to the Imperial Government of this country, and a young Japanese gentleman--Mr. Asso--a very fortunate and delightful ascent of Fuji-San, the famous mountain--you would not wonder, residing here, that everybody in Japan talks about Fuji, and thinks about her; paints her on fans, and limns her with gold on lacquer; carves her on temple-gates and house-fronts, and draws her for curtains of shops and signboards of inns, rest-houses and public institutions. Living in Tokio or Yokohama, or anywhere along this Tokaidô--the Southern road of Japan--you would soon perceive how the great volcano dominates every landscape, asserts perpetually her sovereignty over all other hills and mountains, and becomes in reality as well as imagination, an indispensable element in the national scenery. Far away at sea, when approaching Japan, if the weather be clear, long before the faintest blue line of coast is discernible from the deck, there is seen hanging in the air a dim white symmetrical cone, too constant for a cloud, which is Fuji-San. After you have landed and taken up your residence in Yokohama, Tokio, or any point of the southeastern littoral, you will be always seeing Fuji-Yama from some garden-nook, some tea-house gallery, some grove of cryptomerias, or thicket of bamboo, or even from the railway-carriage window. In the spring and autumn, as frequently as not, she will, indeed, be shrouded in the dense masses of white or grey cumulus which her crest collects, and seems to create in the mists of the Pacific. But during summer, when the snows are all melted from the vast cone, and again in winter, when she is covered with snow half-way down her colossal sides, but the air is clear, the superb mountain stands forth, dawn after dawn, and evening after evening--like no other eminence in the world for beauty, majesty, and perfectness of outline. There are loftier peaks, of course, for Fuji-San is not much higher than Mont Blanc, but there is none--not even Etna--which rises so proudly alone, isolated, distinct, from the very brink of the sea--with nothing to hide or diminish the dignity of the splendid and immense curves sweeping up from where the broad foot rests, planted on the Suruga Gulf, to where the imperial head soars, lifted high above the clouds into the blue of the firmament. By many and many a picture or photograph you must know well those almost perfectly matched flanks, that massive base, the towering lines of that mighty cone, slightly truncated and dentated at the summit. But no picture gives, and no artist could ever reproduce, the variety and charm of the aspect which Fuji-San puts on from day to day and hour to hour under the differing influences of air and weather. Sometimes it is as a white cloud that you see her, among the white clouds, changeless among the changeful shapes from which she emerges. Sometimes there will break forth, high above all clouds, a patch of deep grey against the blue, the broad head of Fuji. Sometimes you will only know where she sits by the immense collection of cirrus and cirro-cumulus there alone gathered in the sky; and sometimes--principally at dawn and nightfall--she will suddenly manifest herself, from her foot, jewelled with rich harvests, to her brow, bare and lonely as a desert--all violet against the gold of the setting sun, or else all gold and green against the rose and silver of the daybreak....

As late as the Fourteenth Century Fuji was constantly smoking, and fire is spoken of with the eruptions, the last of which took place in December, 1707, and continued for nearly forty days. The Ho-Yei-san, or hump in the south face, was probably then formed. In this, her final outbreak, Fuji covered Tokio itself, sixty miles away, with six inches of ash, and sent rivers of lava far and wide. Since then she has slept, and only one little spot underneath the Kwan-nom-Gatake, on the lip of the crater, where steam exhales, and the red pumice-cracks are hot, shows that the heart of this huge volcano yet glows, and that she is capable of destroying again her own beauty and the forests and rich regions of fertility which clothe her knees and feet.

It is a circuit of 120 miles to go all round the base of Fuji-San. If you could cut a tunnel through her from Yoshiwara to Kawaguchi, it would be forty miles long. Generally speaking, the lower portion of the mountain is cultivated to a height of 1,500 feet, and it is a whole province which thus climbs round her. From the border of the farms there begins a rough and wild, but flowery moorland, which stretches round the hill to an elevation of 4,000 feet, where there the thick forest-belt commences. This girdles the volcano up to 7,000 feet on the Subashiri side and 8,000 on the Murayama fall, but is lower to the eastward. Above the forest extends a narrow zone of thicket and bush, chiefly dwarfed larch, juniper and a vaccinium; after which comes the bare, burnt, and terribly majestic peak itself, where the only living thing is a little yellow lichen which grows in the fissures of the lava blocks, for no eagle or hawk ventures so high, and the boldest or most bewildered butterfly will not be seen above the bushes half-way down.

The best--indeed, the only--time for the ascent of the mountain is between July 15th and September 5th. During this brief season the snow will be melted from the cone, the huts upon the path will be opened for pilgrims, and there will be only the danger of getting caught by a typhoon, or reaching the summit to find it swathed day after day in clouds, and no view obtainable. Our party of three started for the ascent on August 25th, taking that one of the many roads by which Fuji is approached that goes by Subashiri. Such an expedition may be divided into a series of stages. You have first to approach the foot of the mountain by train or otherwise, then to ride through the long slope of cultivated region. Then, abandoning horses or vehicles, to traverse on foot the sharper slopes of the forest belt. At the confines of this you will reach the first station, called _Sho_ or _Go_; for Japanese fancy has likened the mountain to a heap of dry rice and the stations are named by rice-measure. From the first station to the ninth, whatever road you take, all will be hard, hot, continuous climbing. You must go by narrow, bad paths, such as a goat might make, in loose volcanic dust, gritty pumice, or over the sharp edges of lava dykes, which cut boots and sandals to shreds....

At daybreak the horses are brought, and the six coolies, two by two, bind upon their backs the _futons_ and the food. We start, a long procession, through a broad avenue in the forest, riding for five miles, under a lovely dawn, the sun shining gloriously on the forehead of Fuji, who seems further off and more immensely lofty the nearer we approach. The woodland is full of wild strawberries and flowers; including tiger-lilies, clematis, Canterbury bells, and the blue _hotari-no hana_, or fire-fly blossom. At 6:30 A. M., we reach Uma-Gayeshi, or “turn-the-horses-back”; and hence to the mountain top there is nothing for it but to walk every step of the long, steep, and difficult path. Two of the men with the lightest loads led the way along the narrow path, in a wood so thick that we shall not see Fuji again till we have passed through it. It takes us every now and then through the gates and precincts of little Shinto temples, where the priests offer us tea or mountain water. In one of them, at Ko-mitake, we are invited to ring the brass gong in order that the Deity may make our limbs strong for the task before us. And this is solemnly done by all hands, the _ninsoku_ slapping their brown thighs piously after sounding the bell....

The shortest time in which the ascent has been made is six hours and a half. We, taking it more easily, made no attempt to beat the record, and stopped frequently to botanize, geologize, etc. The rarefaction of the air gave our Japanese companion, Takaji San, a slight headache, which soon passed as the circulation became accustomed to the atmosphere; but Captain Ingles and I, being I suppose, both in excellent health and strength, experienced no inconvenience worth mentioning.

At half-past four next morning, while I was dreaming under my thick coverings, a hand touched me and a voice said softly, “Danna Sama, hi no de!” “Master, here is the sun!” The _shoji_ at my feet were thrown open. I looked out, almost as you might from the moon, over a prodigious abyss of space, beyond which the eastern rim of all the world seemed to be on fire with flaming light. A belt of splendid rose and gold illumined all the horizon, darting long spears of glory into the dark sky overhead, gilding the tops of a thousand hills, scattered over the purple plains below, and casting on the unbroken background of clouds beyond an enormous shadow of Fuji. The spectacle was of unparalleled splendour, recalling Lord Tennyson’s line--

“And, in the East,
God made himself an awful Rose of Dawn.”

Moment by moment it grew more wonderful in loveliness of colour and brilliant birth of day; and then, suddenly, just when the sun rolled into sight--an orb of gleaming gold, flooding the world beneath with almost insufferable radiance--a vast mass of dense white clouds swept before the north wind over the view, completely blotting out the sun, the belt of rose and gold, the lighted mountains and plains, and the lower regions of Fuji-San. It was day again, but misty, white, and doubtful; and when we started to climb the last two stages of the cone the flags of the stations were invisible, and we could not know whether we should find the summit clear, or wrapped in enveloping clouds.

All was to be fortunate, however, on this happy day; and after a hard clambering of the remaining 2,000 feet we planted our staffs victoriously on the level ground of the crater’s lip and gazed north, south, east, and west through clear and cloudless atmosphere over a prodigious prospect, whose diameter could not be less than 300 miles. It was one of the few days when O-ana-mochi, the Lord of the Great Hole, was wholly propitious! Behind the long row of little black huts standing on the edge of the mountain, gaped that awful, deadly Cup of the Volcano--an immense pit half a mile wide and six or seven hundred feet deep, its sides black, yellow, red, white, and grey, with the varying hues of the lava and scoriæ. In one spot where a perpetual shadow lay, from the ridge-peaks of Ken-ga-mine and the Shaka-no-wari-ishi, or “Cleft Rock of Buddha,” gleamed a large patch of unmelted snow, and there was dust-covered snow at the bottom of the crater. We skirted part of the crater, passed by the dangerous path which is styled “Oya-shirazu, Ko-shirazu,” “The place where you must forget parents and children, to take care of yourself;” saw the issue of the Kim-mei-sai or “Golden famous water,” and of the Gim-mei-sai, or “Silver famous water”; and came back to breakfast at our hut silent with the delight and glory, the beauty and terror of the scene. Enormous flocks of fleecy clouds and cloudlets wandered in the lower air, many thousand feet beneath, but nowhere concealed the lakes, peaks, rivers, towns, villages, valleys, sea-coasts, islands, and distant provinces spreading out all round. Imagine the prospect obtainable at 13,000 feet of elevation through the silvery air of Japan on a summer’s morning with not a cloud, except shifting, thin, and transitory ones, to veil the view!...

At the temple with the bell we were duly stamped--shirts, sticks, and clothing--with the sacred mark of the mountain, and having made the hearts of our faithful and patient _ninsoku_ glad with extra pay, turned our backs on the great extinct volcano, whose crest, glowing again in the morning sunlight, had no longer any secrets for Captain Ingles, or Takaji San, or myself.

_Seas and Lands_ (New York, 1891).

THE CEDARS OF LEBANON

(_SYRIA_)

ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE

The Sheik of Eden, the last inhabited village towards the summit of Lebanon, was the maternal uncle of M. Mazoyer, my interpreter. Informed by his nephew of our arrival in Tripoli, the venerable sheik descended the mountain with his eldest son and a portion of his retinue; he came to visit me at the convent of the Franciscans, and offered me hospitality at his home in Eden. From Eden to the Cedars of Solomon it is only a three hours’ march; and if the snows that cover the mountains will permit us, we can visit these ancient trees that have spread their glory over all Lebanon and that are contemporaries of the great king; we accepted, and the start was arranged for the following day.

At five o’clock in the morning we were on horseback. The caravan, more numerous than usual, was preceded by the Sheik of Eden, an admirable old man whose elegance of manner, noble and easy politeness, and magnificent costume were far from suggesting an Arab chieftain; one would have called him a patriarch marching at the head of his tribe; he rode upon a mare of the desert whose golden-bay skin and floating mane would have made a worthy mount for a hero of Jerusalem; his son and his principal attendants caracoled upon magnificent stallions, a few paces before him; we came next, and then the long file of our _moukres_ and our Saïs....