Chapter C: F. Gordon-Cumming (3)

It has an interest, however, beyond and apart from that of beauty. It rouses one’s imagination to a sense of the greatness of the Nile. We look across a world of desert, and see the river still coming from afar. We have reached a point at which all that is habitable and familiar comes abruptly to an end. Not a village, not a bean-field, not a shâdûf, not a sakkieh, is to be seen in the plain below. There is no sail on these dangerous waters. There is no moving creature on these pathless sands. But for the telegraphic wires stalking ghost-like, across the desert, it would seem as if we had touched the limit of civilization, and were standing on the threshold of a land unexplored.

Yet for all this, we feel as if we were at only the beginning of the mighty river. We have journeyed well-nigh a thousand miles against the stream; but what is that to the distance which still lies between us and the Great Lakes? And how far beyond the Great Lakes must we seek for the source that is even yet undiscovered?

_A Thousand Miles Up the Nile_ (London, 1890).

IN THE ALPS

(_SWITZERLAND_)

THÉOPHILE GAUTIER

The foot of the high mountains that form the chain of Mount Blanc, clothed with forests and pastures, revealed hues of delightful intensity and vigour. Imagine an immense piece of green velvet crumpled into large folds like the curtain of a theatre with the deep black of its hollows and the golden glitterings of its lights; this is a very faint image for the grandeur of the object, but I know of none that could better describe the effect.

Scheele’s green, mineral green, all those greens that result from the combinations of Prussian blue and yellow ochre, or Naples yellow, the mixture of indigo and Indian yellow, Veronese green and _vert prasin_ could not reproduce that quality of green that we might properly call mountain green and which passes from velvety black into the tenderest shades of green. In this play of shades, the firs form the shadows; the deciduous trees and the spaces of meadow or moss, the lights. The undulations and the cleft ravines of the mountain break these great masses of green, this vigorous foreground, this energetic _répoussoir_, rendering the light tones of the zones, (bare of verdure and crowned by the high lights of the snows,) more vaporous and throwing them back. In the various more open places, the grass grows green in the sun; and trees resembling little black patches sown upon this light ground give it the appearance of tufted material. But when we speak of trees and firs, woods and forests, do not picture to yourselves anything but vast blots of dark moss upon the slopes of the mountains: the highest trunks there assume the proportion of a blade of grass.

The road turns towards the left, and, gliding between stones and blocks that have fallen down or drifted into the valley by means of the winter torrents and avalanches, soon enters a forest of birch-trees, firs, and larches whose openings allow you to see on the other side the _Aiguilles Rouges_ and _le Brevent_, which face Montanvert. The ascent was gentle enough and the mules climbed it with easy gait; in comparison with the road which we scaled the night before to go to the _Pierre pointue_, the route was a true alley of the Bois de Boulogne. The zigzags of the road turned at angles sufficiently long not to fatigue either the rider or his mount. The sunlight played in the foliage of the forest that we traversed and made a shadow shot through with rays float over us. Upon the rocks at the foot of the trees, mosses of emerald green gleamed and lovely little wild flowers brightly bloomed, while in the spaces through the branches a bluish mist betrayed the depth of the abyss, for the little caravan, going along single file and constantly ascending, had now reached the Caillet fountain, which is regarded as half-way up the mountain. This fountain, of excellent water, runs into a wooden trough. The mules halt there to drink. A cabin is built near the fountain and they offer you a glass of water made opalescent with a few drops of kirsch, cognac, beer, and other refreshments. We regaled our guides with a glass of brandy, which, notwithstanding their sobriety, they seemed to prefer to that diamond liquid that sprang from the rock.

From this point, the road began to grow steeper; the ascents multiplied without, however, offering any difficulties to mules or pedestrians. The air became more keen. The forest grew lighter, the trees stood at greater intervals from each other and stopped as if out of breath. They seemed to say to us, “Now, go up alone, we cannot go any further.” The rounded plateau that we mount by keeping to the right is not desolate and denuded as one would believe; a grass, sturdy enough and enamelled with Alpine flowers, forms its carpet, and when you have gone beyond it, you perceive the _châlet_ or inn of Montanvert below the _Aiguille de Charmoz_.

From this plateau you have a superb view, an astonishing, apocalyptic view, beyond all dreams. At your feet, between two banks of gigantic peaks, flows motionless, as if congealed during the tumult of a tempest, that broad river of crystal which is called the Mer de Glace, and which lower towards the plain is called the _Glacier des Bois_. The _Mer de Glace_ comes from a high altitude; it receives many glaciers as a river its tributaries. We will speak of it presently, but for the moment let us occupy ourselves with the spectacle that unfolds beneath our eyes.

Opposite the inn of Montanvert, the glacier is half a league from one bank to the other, perhaps even more, for it is difficult to gauge distance in the mountains with exactness; it is about the width of the Thames, the Neva or the Guadalquiver towards their mouth. But the slope is much more abrupt than was ever that of any river. It descends by large waves rounded at their tops, like billows that never break into foam and whose hollows take a bluish colour. When the ground that serves as a bed for this torrent of ice becomes too abrupt, the mass is dislocated and breaks up into slabs that rest one upon the other and which resemble those little columns of white marble in the Turkish cemeteries that are forced to lean to right or left by their own weight; crevasses more or less wide and deep manifest themselves, opening the immense block and revealing the virgin ice in all its purity. The walls of these crevasses assume magical colours, tints of an azure grotto. An ideal blue that is neither the blue of the sky nor the blue of the water, but the blue of ice, an unnamed tone that is never found on the artist’s palette illumines these splendid clefts and turns sometimes to a green of aqua marine or mother of pearl by gradations of astonishing delicacy. On the other bank, clearly detached by its sharp escarpment like the spire of a gigantic cathedral, the high _Aiguille du Dru_ rises with so proud, so elegant, and so bold a spring. Ascending the glacier, the _Aiguille Verte_ stands out in front of it, being even higher though the perspective makes it appear lower. From the foot of the _Aiguille du Dru_, like a rivulet towards a river, descends the Mont Blanc glacier. A little further to the right, the _Aiguille du Moine_ and that of _Léchaud_ show themselves, obelisks of granite which the sunlight tints with reflections of rose and the snow makes gleam with several touches of silver. It is difficult to express in words the unexpected outlines, the strange flashes, the tops cut and indented in the form of saw-teeth, gable-ends and crosses that are affected by these inaccessible peaks with almost vertical walls,--often even sloping outwards and overhanging. Running your eye along the same bank of the glacier and descending towards the valley, you see the _Aiguille du Bochard_, _le Chapeau_, which is nothing more or less than a rounded mountain, grassy and enamelled with flowers, not so high as Montanvert, and the forests which have given to this portion of the _Mer de Glace_ the name of _Glacier des Bois_, bordering it with a line of sombre verdure.

There are in the _Mer de Glace_ two veins that divide it throughout its length like the currents of two rivers that never mingle: a black vein and a white vein. The black one flows by the side of the bank where the _Aiguille du Dru_ rears itself, and the white one bathes the foot of Montanvert; but words when we speak of colour only half describe shades, and it must not be imagined that this demarcation is as clearly defined as we have indicated. It is, however, very sensible.

On looking towards the upper portion of the glacier, at the spot where it precipitates itself into the rock passage which conducts it to the valley like a furiously boiling cascade with wild spurts which some magic power has turned into ice at its strongest leap, you discover, arranged like an amphitheatre, the _Montagne des Périades_, the _Petites Jorasses_, the _Grandes Jorasses_, and the _Aiguille du Géant_, covered with eternal snow, the white diadem of the Alps which the suns of summer are powerless to melt and which scintillate with a pure and cold brilliancy in the clear blue of the sky.

At the foot of the Périades, the glacier, as may be seen from Montanvert, divides into two branches, one of which ascends towards the east and takes the name of the _Glacier de Léchaud_, while the other takes its course behind the _Aiguilles de Chamouni_ towards _Mont Blanc du Tacul_, and is called the _Glacier du Géant_. A third branch, named the _Glacier du Talifre_, spreads out over the slopes of the _Aiguille Verte_.

It is in the middle of the _Talifre_ where lies that oasis of the glaciers that is called the _Jardin_, a kind of basket of Alpine flowers, which find there a pinch of vegetable earth, a few rays of sunshine, and a girdle of stones that isolate them from the neighbouring ice; but to climb to the _Jardin_ is a long, fatiguing and even dangerous excursion, necessitating a night’s sleep at the _châlet_ of Montanvert.

We resumed our journey not without having gathered several bunches of rhododendrons of the freshest green and brightest rose, that opened in the liberty and solitude of the mountains by means of the pure Alpine breeze. You descend by the same route more rapidly than you ascended.

The mules stepped gaily by the side of their leaders, who carried the sticks, canes and umbrellas, which had now become useless. We traversed the forest of pines pierced here and there by the torrents of stones of the avalanches; we gained the plain and were soon at Chamouni to go to the source of the Arveiron, which is found at the base of the _Glacier des Bois_, the name that is assumed by the _Mer de Glace_ on arriving in the valley.

This is an excursion that you can make in a carriage. You follow the bottom of the valley, cross the Arve at the hamlet of Praz, and after having passed the _Hameau des Bois_, where you must alight, you arrive, winding among masses of rocks in disorder and pools of water across which logs are placed, at the wall of the glacier, which reveals itself by its slit and tortured edges, full of cavities and gashes where the blue-green hatchings colour the transparent whiteness of the mass.

The white teeth of the glacier stand out clearly against the sombre green of the forests of Bochard and Montanvert and are majestically dominated by the _Aiguille du Dru_, which shoots its granite obelisk three thousand nine hundred and six _metres_ into the depths of the sky, and the foreground is formed by the most prodigious confusion of stones, rocks and blocks that a painter could wish for giving value to those vapourous depths. The Arveiron foams and roars across this chaos and, after half an hour of frantic disordered course, loses itself in the Arve.

_Les Vacances de Lundi_ (Paris, 1881).

THE VALE OF KASHMIR

(_INDIA_)

ANDREW WILSON

Almost every one longs, and many hope, to see the beautiful Vale of Kashmir. Probably no region of the earth is so well known to the eye of imagination, or so readily suggests the idea of a terrestrial Paradise. So far from having been disappointed with the reality, or having experienced any cause for wishing that I had left Kashmir unvisited, I can most sincerely say that the beautiful reality excels the somewhat vague poetic vision which has been associated with the name. But Kashmir is rather a difficult country to get at, especially when you come down upon it from behind by way of Zanskar and Súrú. According to tradition, it was formerly the Garden of Eden; and one is very well disposed to accept that theory when trying to get into it from the north or northwest.

After months of the sterile, almost treeless Tibetan provinces, the contrast was very striking, and I could not but revel in the beauty and glory of the vegetation; but even to one who had come up upon it from below, the scene would have been very striking. There was a large and lively encampment at the foot of the pass, with tents prepared for the Yarkand envoy, and a number of Kashmir officers and soldiers; but I pushed on beyond that, and camped in solitude close to the Sind river, just beneath the Panjtarne valley, which leads up towards the caves of Ambernath, a celebrated place for Hindú pilgrimage. This place is called Báltal, but it has no human habitations. Smooth green meadows, carpet-like and embroidered with flowers, extended to the silvery stream, above which there was the most varied luxuriance of foliage, the lower mountains being most richly clothed with woods of many and beautiful colours. It was late autumn, and the trees were in their greatest variety of colour; but hardly a leaf seemed to have fallen. The dark green of the pines contrasted beautifully with the delicate orange of the birches, because there were intermingling tints of brown and saffron. Great masses of foliage were succeeded by solitary pines, which had found a footing high up the precipitous crags.

And all this was combined with peaks and slopes of pure white snow. _Aiguilles_ of dark rock rose out of beds of snow, but their faces were powdered with the same element. Glaciers and long beds of snow ran down the valleys, and the upper vegetation had snow for its bed. The effect of sunset upon this scene was wonderful; for the colours it displayed were both heightened and more harmoniously blended. The golden light of eve brought out the warm tints of the forest; but the glow of the reddish-brown precipices, and the rosy light upon the snowy slopes and peaks, were too soon succeeded by the cold grey of evening. At first, however, the wondrous scene was still visible in a quarter-moon’s silvery light, in which the Panjtarne valley was in truth--

“A wild romantic chasm that slanted
Down the sweet hill athwart a cedarn cover--
A savage place, as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath the waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon lover.”

The demon lovers to be met with in that wild valley are bears, which are in abundance, and a more delightful place for a hunter to spend a month in could hardly be invented; but he would have to depend on his rifle for supplies, or have them sent up from many miles down the Sind valley.

The remainder of my journey down the latter valley to the great valley or small plain of Kashmir was delightful. A good deal of rain fell, but that made one appreciate the great trees all the more, for the rain was not continuous, and was mingled with sunshine. At times, during the season when I saw it, this “inland depth” is “roaring like the sea;”

“While trees, dim-seen in frenzied numbers tear
The lingering remnant of their yellow hair;”

but soon after it is bathed in perfect peace and mellow sunlight. The air was soft and balmy; but, at this transfer from September to October, it was agreeably cool even to a traveller from the abodes and sources of snow. As we descended, the pine-forests were confined to the mountain-slopes; but the lofty deodar began to appear in the valley, as afterwards the sycamore, the elm, and the horse-chestnut. Round the picturesque villages, and even forming considerable woods, there were fruit-trees--as the walnut, the chestnut, the peach, the apricot, the apple, and the pear. Large quantities of timber (said to be cut recklessly) was in course of being floated down the river; and where the path led across it there were curious wooden bridges for which it was not necessary to dismount. This Sind valley is about sixty miles long, and varies in breadth from a few hundred yards to about a mile, except at its base, where it opens out considerably. It is considered to afford the best idea of the mingled beauty and grandeur of Kashmir scenery; and when I passed through its appearance was greatly enhanced by the snow, which not only covered the mountain-tops, but also came down into the forests which clothed the mountain-sides. The path through it, being part of the great road from Kashmir to Central Asia, is kept in tolerable repair, and it is very rarely that the rider requires to dismount. Anything beyond a walking-pace, however, is for the most part out of the question. Montgomerie divides the journey from Srinagar to Báltal (where I camped below the Zoji La) into six marches, making in all sixty-seven miles; and though two of these marches may be done in one day, yet if you are to travel easily and enjoy the scenery, one a day is sufficient. The easiest double march is from Sonamarg to Gond, and I did it in a day with apparent ease on a very poor pony; but the consequence is that I beat my brains in order to recall what sort of a place Gond was, no distinct recollection of it having been left on my mind, except of a grove of large trees and a roaring fire in front of my tent at night. Sonamarg struck me as a very pleasant place; and I had there, in the person of a youthful captain from Abbotabad, the pleasure of meeting the first European I had seen since leaving Lahaul. We dined together, and I found he had come up from Srinagar to see Sonamarg, and he spoke with great enthusiasm of a view he had had, from another part of Kashmir, of the 26,000 feet mountain Nanga Parbat. _Marg_ means “meadow,” and seems to be applied especially to elevated meadows; _sona_ stands for “golden”: and this place is a favourite resort in the hot malarious months of July and August, both for Europeans in Kashmir and for natives of rank.

At Ganderbahl I was fairly in the great valley of Kashmir, and encamped under some enormous _chúnár_ or sycamore trees; the girth of one was so great that its trunk kept my little mountain-tent quite sheltered from the furious blasts. Truly--

“There was a roaring in the wind all night,
The rain fell heavily, and fell in floods,

but that gigantic _chúnár_ kept off both wind and rain wonderfully. Next day a small but convenient and quaint Kashmir boat took me up to Srinagar; and it was delightful to glide up the backwaters of the Jhelam, which afforded a highway to the capital. It was the commencement and the promise of repose, which I very sadly needed, and in a beautiful land.

I afterwards went up to Islamabad, Martand, Achibal, Vernag, the Rozlú valley, and finally went out of Kashmir by way of the Manas and Wúlar Lakes, and the lower valley of the Jhelam, so that I saw the most interesting places in the country, and all the varieties of scenery which it affords. That country has been so often visited and described, that, with one or two exceptions, I shall only touch generally upon its characteristics. It doubtless owes some of its charm to the character of the regions in its neighbourhood. As compared with the burning plains of India, the sterile steppes of Tibet, and the savage mountains of the Himalaya and of Afghanistan, it presents an astonishing and beautiful contrast. After such scenes even a much more commonplace country might have afforded a good deal of the enthusiasm which Kashmir has excited in Eastern poetry, and even in common rumour; but beyond that it has characteristics which give it a distinct place among the most pleasing regions of the earth. I said to the Maharajah, or ruling Prince of Kashmir, that the most beautiful countries I had seen were England, Italy, Japan, and Kashmir; and though he did not seem to like the remark much, probably from a fear that the beauty of the land he governed might make it too much an object of desire, yet there was no exaggeration in it. Here, at a height of nearly 6,000 feet, in a temperate climate, with abundance of moisture, and yet protected by lofty mountains from the fierce continuous rains of the Indian southwest monsoon, we have the most splendid amphitheatre in the world. A flat oval valley about sixty miles long, and from forty in breadth, is surrounded by magnificent mountains, which, during the greater part of the year, are covered more than half-way down with snow, and present vast upland beds of pure white snow. This valley has fine lakes, is intersected with water-courses, and its land is covered with brilliant vegetation, including gigantic trees of the richest foliage. And out of this great central valley there rise innumerable, long, picturesque mountain-valleys, such as that of the Sind river, which I have just described; while above these there are great pine-forests, green slopes of grass, glaciers, and snow. Nothing could express the general effect better than Moore’s famous lines on sainted Lebanon--

“Whose head in wintry grandeur towers,
And whitens with eternal sleet;
While Summer, in a vale of flowers,
Is sleeping rosy at his feet.”

The great encircling walls of rock and snow contrast grandly with the soft beauty of the scene beneath. The snows have a wonderful effect as we look up to them through the leafy branches of the immense _chúnár_, elm, and poplar trees. They flash gloriously in the morning sunlight above the pink mist of the valley-plain; they have a rosy glow in the evening sunlight; and when the sunlight has departed, but ere darkness shrouds them, they gleam, afar off, with a cold and spectral light, as if they belonged to a region where man had never trod. The deep black gorges in the mountains have a mysterious look. The sun lights up some softer grassy ravine or green slope, and then displays splintered rocks rising in the wildest confusion. Often long lines of white clouds lie along the line of mountain-summits, while at other times every white peak and precipice-wall is distinctly marked against the deep-blue sky. The valley-plain is especially striking in clear mornings and evenings, where it lies partly in golden sunlight, partly in the shadow of its great hills.

The green mosaic of the level land is intersected by many streams, canals or lakes, or beautiful reaches of river which look like small lakes. The lakes have floating islands composed of vegetation. Besides the immense _chúnárs_ and elms, and the long lines of stately poplars, great part of the plain is a garden filled with fruits and flowers, and there is almost constant verdure.

“There eternal summer dwells,
And west winds, with musky wing,
About the cedar’d alleys fling
Nard and cassia’s balmy smells.”

_Travel, Adventure and Sport from Blackwood’s Magazine_ (Edinburgh and London), Vol. vi.

THE LAKE OF PITCH

(_TRINIDAD_)

CHARLES KINGSLEY

This Pitch Lake should be counted among the wonders of the world; for it is, certainly, tolerably big. It covers ninety-nine acres, and contains millions of tons of so-called pitch.

Its first discoverers were not bound to see that a pitch lake of ninety-nine acres was no more wonderful than any of the little pitch wells--“spues” or “galls,” as we should call them in Hampshire--a yard across; or any one of the tiny veins and lumps of pitch which abound in the surrounding forests; and no less wonderful than if it had covered ninety-nine thousand acres instead of ninety-nine.

As we neared the shore, we perceived that the beach was black with pitch; and the breeze being off the land, the asphalt smell (not unpleasant) came off to welcome us. We rowed in, and saw in front of a little row of wooden houses, a tall mulatto, in blue policeman’s dress, gesticulating and shouting to us. He was the ward policeman, and I found him (as I did all the coloured police) able and courteous, shrewd and trusty. These police are excellent specimens of what can be made of the Negro, or Half-Negro, if he be but first drilled, and then given a responsibility which calls out his self-respect. He was warning our crew not to run aground on one or other of the pitch reefs, which here take the place of rocks. A large one, a hundred yards off on the left, has been almost all dug away, and carried to New York or to Paris to make asphalt pavement.

The boat was run ashore, under his directions, on a spit of sand between the pitch; and when she ceased bumping up and down in the muddy surf, we scrambled out into a world exactly the hue of its inhabitants--of every shade, from jet-black to copper-brown. The pebbles on the shore were pitch. A tide-pool close by was enclosed in pitch: a four-eyes was swimming about in it, staring up at us; and when we hunted him, tried to escape, not by diving, but by jumping on shore on the pitch, and scrambling off between our legs. While the policeman, after profoundest courtesies, was gone to get a mule-cart to take us up to the lake, and planks to bridge its water-channels, we took a look round at this oddest of the corners of the earth.

In front of us was the unit of civilization--the police-station, wooden on wooden stilts (as all well-built houses are here), to ensure a draught of air beneath them. We were, of course, asked to come and sit down, but preferred looking around, under our umbrellas; for the heat was intense. The soil is half pitch, half brown earth, among which the pitch sweals in and out, as tallow sweals from a candle. It is always in slow motion under the heat of the tropic sun: and no wonder if some of the cottages have sunk right and left in such a treacherous foundation. A stone or brick house could not stand here: but wood and palm-thatch are both light and tough enough to be safe, let the ground give way as it will.

The soil, however, is very rich. The pitch certainly does not injure vegetation, though plants will not grow actually in it. The first plants which caught our eyes were pine-apples; for which La Brea is famous. The heat of the soil, as well as of the air, brings them to special perfection. They grow about anywhere, unprotected by hedge or fence; for the Negroes here seem honest enough, at least towards each other. And at the corner of the house was a bush worth looking at, for we had heard of it for many a year. It bore prickly, heart-shaped pods an inch long, filled with seeds coated with a rich waxy pulp.

This was a famous plant--Bixa, Orellana, Roucou; and that pulp was the well-known Arnotta dye of commerce. In England and Holland, it is used merely, I believe, to colour cheeses; but in the Spanish Main, to colour human beings. As we went onward up the gentle slope (the rise is one hundred and thirty-eight feet in rather more than a mile), the ground became more and more full of pitch, and the vegetation poorer and more rushy, till it resembled on the whole, that of an English fen. An Ipomœa or two, and a scarlet-flowered dwarf Heliconia kept up the tropic type as does a stiff brittle fern about two feet high.

The plateau of pitch now widened out, and the whole ground looked like an asphalt pavement, half overgrown with marsh-loving weeds, whose roots feed in the sloppy water which overlies the pitch. But, as yet, there was no sign of the lake. The incline, though gentle, shuts off the view of what is beyond. This last lip of the lake has surely overflowed, and is overflowing still, though very slowly. Its furrows all curve downward; and, it is, in fact, as one of our party said, “a black glacier.” The pitch, expanding under the burning sun of day, must needs expand most towards the line of least resistance, that is, down hill; and when it contracts again under the coolness of night, it contracts surely from the same cause, more downhill than it does uphill; so that each particle never returns to the spot whence it started, but rather drags the particles above it downward towards itself. At least, so it seemed to us.

At last we surmounted the last rise, and before us lay the famous lake--not at the bottom of a depression, as we expected, but at the top of a rise, whence the ground slopes away from it on two sides, and rises from it very slightly on the two others. The black pool glared and glittered in the sun. A group of islands, some twenty yards wide, were scattered about the middle of it. Beyond it rose a noble forest of Moriche fan-palms; and to the right of them high wood with giant Mombins and undergrowth of Cocorite--a paradise on the other side of the Stygian pool.

We walked, with some misgivings, on to the asphalt, and found it perfectly hard. In a few yards we were stopped by a channel of clear water, with tiny fish and water-beetles in it; and, looking round, saw that the whole lake was intersected with channels, so unlike anything which can be seen elsewhere, that it is not easy to describe them.

Conceive a crowd of mushrooms, of all shapes from ten to fifty feet across, close together side by side, their tops being kept at exactly the same level, their rounded rims squeezed tight against each other; then conceive water poured on them so as to fill the parting seams, and in the wet season, during which we visited it, to overflow the tops somewhat. Thus would each mushroom represent, tolerably well, one of the innumerable flat asphalt bosses, which seem to have sprung up each from a separate centre.

In five minutes we had seen, handled, and smelt enough to satisfy us with this very odd and very nasty vagary of tropic nature; and as we did not wish to become faint or ill, between the sulphuretted hydrogen and the blaze of the sun reflected off-the hot black pitch, we hurried on over the water-furrows, and through the sedge-beds to the further shore--to find ourselves in a single step out of an Inferno into a Paradise.

We looked back at the foul place, and agreed that it is well for the human mind that the Pitch Lake was still unknown when Dante wrote that hideous poem of his--the opprobrium (as I hold) of the Middle Age. For if such were the dreams of its noblest and purest genius, what must have been the dreams of the ignoble and impure multitude? But had he seen this lake, how easy, how tempting too, it would have been to him to embody in imagery the surmise of a certain “Father,” and heighten the torments of the lost being, sinking slowly into that black Bolge beneath the baking rays of the tropic sun, by the sight of the saved, walking where we walked, beneath cool fragrant shade, among the pillars of a temple to which the Parthenon is mean and small.

Sixty feet and more aloft, the short, smooth columns of the Moriches towered around us, till, as we looked through the “pillared shade,” the eye was lost in the green abysses of the forest. Overhead, their great fan-leaves form a grooved roof, compared with which that of St. Mary Radcliff, or even of King’s College, is as clumsy as all man’s works are beside the works of God; and beyond the Moriche wood, ostrich plumes packed close round madder-brown stems, formed a wall to our temple, which bore such tracery, carving, and painting, as would have stricken dumb with awe and delight him who ornamented the Loggie of the Vatican.

What might not have been made, with something of justice and mercy, common sense and humanity, of these gentle Arawaks and Guaraons. What was made of them, almost ere Columbus was dead, may be judged from this one story, taken from Las Casas.

“There was a certain man named Juan Bono, who was employed by the members of the Andencia of St. Domingo to go and obtain Indians. He and his men to the number of fifty or sixty, landed on the Island of Trinidad. Now the Indians of Trinidad were a mild, loving, credulous race, the enemies of the Caribs, who ate human flesh. On Juan Bono’s landing, the Indians armed with bows and arrows, went to meet the Spaniards, and to ask them who they were, and what they wanted. Juan Bono replied that his men were good and peaceful people, who had come to live with the Indians; upon which, as the commencement of good fellowship, the natives offered to build houses for the Spaniards. The Spanish captain expressed a wish to have one large house built. The accommodating Indians set about building it. It was to be in the form of a bell and to be large enough for a hundred persons to live in. On any great occasion it would hold many more.... Upon a certain day Juan Bono collected the Indians together--men, women, and children--in the building ‘to see,’ as he told them, ‘what was to be done.’... A horrible massacre ensued....”

Such was the fate of the poor gentle folk who for unknown ages had swung their hammocks to the stems of these Moriches, spinning the skin of the young leaves into twine, and making sago from the pith, and then wine from the sap and fruit, while they warned their children not to touch the nests of the humming-birds, which even till lately swarmed around the lake. For--so the Indian story ran--once on a time a tribe of Chaymas built their palm-leaf ajoupas upon the very spot, where the lake now lies, and lived a merry life. The sea swarmed with shell-fish and turtle, and the land with pine-apples; the springs were haunted by countless flocks of flamingoes and horned screamers, pajuis and blue ramiers; and, above all, by humming-birds. But the foolish Chaymas were blind to the mystery and beauty of the humming-birds, and would not understand how they were no other than the souls of dead Indians, translated into living jewels; and so they killed them in wantonness, and angered “The Good Spirit.” But one morning, when the Guaraons came by, the Chayma village had sunk deep into the earth, and in its place had risen this Lake of Pitch. So runs the tale, told forty years since to Mr. Joseph, author of a clever little history of Trinidad, by an old half-caste Indian, Señor Trinidada by name, who was said then to be nigh one hundred years of age. Surely the people among whom such a myth could spring up, were worthy of a nobler fate.

_At Last_ (London and New York, 1871).

THE LACHINE RAPIDS

(_CANADA_)

DOUGLAS SLADEN

From St. Anne’s to Lachine is not such a very far cry, and it was at Lachine that the great La Salle had his first seigniory. This Norman founder of Illinois, who reared on the precipices of Fort St. Louis the white flag and his great white cross nearly a couple of centuries before the beginnings of the Metropolis of the West, made his beginnings at his little seigniory round Fort Remy, on the Island of Montreal.

The son of a wealthy and powerful burgher of Rouen, he had been brought up to become a Jesuit. La Salle was well fitted for an ecclesiastic, a prince of the Church, a Richelieu, but not for a Jesuit, whose effacement of self is the keystone of the order. To be one step, one stone in the mighty pyramid of the Order of Jesus was not for him, a man of mighty individuality like Columbus or Cromwell, and accordingly his piety, asceticism, vast ambition, and superhuman courage were lost to the Church and gained to the State. So says Parkman....

His seigniory and fort--probably the Fort Remy of which a contemporary plan has come down to us--were just where the St. Lawrence begins to widen into Lake St. Louis, abreast of the famous Rapids of Lachine, shot by so many tourists with blanched cheeks every summer. I say tourists, for, as I have said before, there is nothing your true Canadian loves so much as the off-chance of being drowned in a cataract or “splifficated” on a toboggan slide. It is part of the national education, like the Bora Bora, or teeth-drawing, of the Australian aborigines. The very name Lachine breathes a memory of La Salle, for it was so christened in scorn by his detractors--the way by which La Salle thinks he is going to get to China. A palisade containing, at any rate, the house of La Salle, a stone mill still standing, and a stone barrack and ammunition house, now falling into most picturesque and pitfallish decay--such is Fort Remy, founded nearly two centuries and a quarter ago, when England was just beginning to feel the invigorating effects of a return to the blessings of Stuart rule. This was in 1667, but La Salle was not destined to remain here long. In two years’ time he had learned seven or eight Indian languages, and felt himself ready for the ambition of his life: to find his way to the Vermilion Sea--the Gulf of California--for a short cut to the wealth of China and Japan,--an ambition which resolved itself into founding a province or Colonial Empire for France at the mouth of the Mississippi, when he discovered later on that the Mississippi flowed into the Gulf of Mexico and not into the Gulf of California.

We cannot follow him in his long connection with the Illinois Indians and Fort St. Louis. We must leave him gazing from the walls of his seigniory across the broad bosom of Lake St. Louis at the forests of Beauharnais and Chateauguay (destined afterwards to be Canada’s Thermopylæ) and the sunset, behind which must be a new passage to the South Seas and the treasures of Cathay and Cipango--the dream which had fired the brain of every discoverer from Columbus and Vasco Nuñez downwards.

Nowadays Lachine suggests principally the canal by which the rapids are avoided, the rapids themselves, and the superb Canadian Pacific Railway Bridge, which is a link in the realization of La Salle’s vast idea. Hard by, too, the St. Lawrence opens out into the expanse of Lake St. Louis, dear to Montreallers in the glowing Canadian summer. Seen from the bank, the rapids are most disappointing to people who expect them to look like Niagara. Seen from the deck of the steamer which runs in connection with the morning and evening train from Montreal, they make the blood of the novice creep, though the safety of the trip is evinced by the fact that it is no longer considered necessary to take a pilot from the neighbouring Indian village of Caughnawaga. It is said that, if the steamer is abandoned to the current, it is impossible for her to strike, the scour being so strong; certainly, her engines are slowed; she reels about like a drunken man; right and left you see fierce green breakers with hissing white fillets threatening to swamp you at every minute. Every second thud of these waves upon the sides convinces you that the ship is aground and about to be dashed to pieces. There seems absolutely no chance of getting safely out of the boiling waters, which often rush together like a couple of fountains. Yet, after a few trips, you know that the Captain is quite justified in sitting in his easy chair and smoking a cigarette all through it. It is admirably described in brief by Dawson: “As the steamer enters the long and turbulent rapids of the Sault St. Louis, the river is contracted and obstructed by islands; and trap dykes, crossing the softer limestone rocks, make, by their uneven wear, a very broken bottom. The fall of the river is also considerable, and the channel tortuous, all which circumstances combined cause this rapid to be more feared than any of the others.

“As the steamer enters the rapids the engines are slowed, retaining a sufficient speed to give steerage way, and, rushing along with the added speed of the swift current, the boat soon begins to labour among the breakers and eddies. The passengers grow excited at the apparently narrow escapes, as the steamer seems almost to touch rock after rock, and dips her prow into the eddies, while the turbulent waters throw their spray over the deck.”

_On the Cars and Off_ (London, New York and Melbourne, 1895).

LAKE ROTORUA

(_NEW ZEALAND_)

H. R. HAWEIS

The thermæ, or hot baths, of the near future are without doubt the marvellous volcanic springs of Rotorua and the Lake Taupo district, in the North Island. They can now be reached from London, _via_ Francisco, in thirty-three days. They concentrate in a small area all the varied qualities of the European springs, and other curative properties of an extraordinary character, which are not possessed in the same degree by any other known waters. Before Mr. Froude’s _Oceana_, and the subsequent destruction of the famous pink terraces, little attention had been called to one of the most romantic and amazing spectacles in the world. The old terraces are indeed gone. The idyllic villages, the blossoming slopes are a waste of volcanic ashes and scoriæ through which the dauntless vegetation is only now beginning to struggle. The blue waters are displaced and muddy, but the disaster of one shock could not rob the land of its extraordinary mystery and beauty. For a distance of three hundred miles, south of Lake Taupo and running north, a volcanic crust, sometimes thin enough to be trodden through, separates the foot from a seething mass of sulphur, gas, and boiling water, which around Rotorua and Waikari finds strange and ample vents, in hot streams, clouds of vapour, warm lakes, geysers, occasionally developing into appalling volcanic outbursts, which certainly invest this region with a weird terror, but also with an inconceivable charm, as white vapour breaks amidst flowering bushes, in the midst of true valleys of paradise; the streams ripple hot and crystalline over parti-coloured rocks or through emerald-hued mossy dells; the warm lakes sleep embedded in soft, weedy banks, reflecting huge boulders, half clothed in tropical foliage; coral-like deposits here and there of various tints reproduce the famous terraces in miniature; and geysers, in odd moments, spout huge volumes of boiling water with an unearthly roar eighty feet into the air. At Waikari, near Lake Taupo, specimens of all these wonders are concentrated in a few square miles--the bubbling white mud pools, like foaming plaster of Paris, the petrifying springs, into which a boy fell some time ago, and getting a good silicate coat over him was taken out months afterwards “as good as ever,” so my guide explained.

“What,” I said, “did he not feel even a little poorly?”

“What’s that?” said the guide, and the joke dawning on him burst into a tardy roar.

And time would fail me to tell of the dragon’s mouth, and open rock vomiting sulphur and steam; the lightning pool, in whose depths for ever flash queer opaline subaqueous flashes; the champagne pool, the Prince of Wales’s Feathers, a geyser which can be made to play half an hour after a few clods of mud have blocked up a little hot stream; the steam hammer, the fairy bath, the donkey engine, etc.

At Rotorua we bought blocks of soap and threw them in to make a certain big geyser spout. The Maoris have still the monopoly there; you pay toll, cross a rickety bridge with a Maori girl as guide, and then visit the pools, terraces, and boiling fountains. They are not nearly so picturesque as at Waikari, which is a wilderness of blossoming glens, streams, and wooded vales. But you see the Maori in his native village.

The volcanic crust is warm to the feet; the Maori huts of “toitoi” reeds and boards are all about; outside are warm pools; naked boys and girls are swimming in them; as we approach they emerge half out of the water; we throw them threepenny bits. The girls seem most eager and dive best--one cunning little girl about twelve or thirteen, I believe, caught her coin each time under water long before it sank, but throwing up her legs half out of water dived deep, pretending to fetch it up from the bottom. Sometimes there was a scramble under water for the coin; the girls generally got it; the boys seemed half lazy. We passed on.

“Here is the brain pot,” said our Maori belle; a hollowed stone. It was heated naturally--the brains cooked very well there in the old days--not very old days either.

“Here is the bread oven.” She drew off the cloth, and sure enough in a hole in the hot ground there were three new loaves getting nicely browned. “Here are potatoes,” and she pointed to a little boiling pool, and the potatoes were nearly done; and “here is meat,”--a tin let into the earth, that was all, contained a joint baking; and farther on was a very good stew--at least, it being one o’clock, it smelt well enough. And so there is no fuel and no fire wanted in this and dozens of other Maori pahs or hamlets. In the cold nights the Maoris come out of their tents naked, and sit or even sleep in the hot shallow lakelets and pools hard by. Anything more uncanny than this walk through the Rotorua Geyser village can hardly be conceived. The best springs are rented from the Maoris by the Government, or local hotel-keepers. These are now increasingly fashionable bathing resorts. The finest bath specific for rheumatism is the Rachel bath, investing the body with a soft, satiny texture, and a pearly complexion; the iron, sulphur, and especially the oil bath, from which when you emerge you have but to shake yourself dry. But the Priest’s bath, so called from the discoverer, Father Mahoney--who cured himself of obstinate rheumatism--is perhaps of all the most miraculous in its effects, and there are no two opinions about it. Here take place the most incredible cures of sciatica, gout, lumbago, and all sorts of rheumatic affections. It is simply a question of fact.

The Countess of Glasgow herself told me about the cure of a certain colonel relative or aide-de-camp of the Governor, the Earl of Glasgow. The Colonel had for years been a perfect martyr to rheumatism and gout. He went to Rotorua with his swollen legs and feet, and came away wearing tight boots, and “as good as ever,” as my guide would have said. But indeed I heard of scores of similar cases. Let all victims who can afford it lay it well to heart. A pleasure trip, of only thirty-two days, changing saloon rail carriage but three times, and steamer cabins but twice, will insure them an almost infallible cure, even when chronically diseased and no longer young. This is no “jeujah” affair. I have seen and spoken to the fortunate _beneficiares_--you meet them all over New Zealand. Of course, the fame of the baths is spreading: the region is only just made accessible by the opening of the railway from Auckland to Rotorua--a ten hours’ run. The Waikari and Taupo baths are very similar, and the situation is infinitely more romantic, but the Government, on account of the railway, are pushing the Rotorua baths.

I stole out about half-past ten at night; it was clear and frosty. I made my way to a warm lake at the bottom of the hotel grounds, a little shed and a tallow candle being the only accommodation provided. Anything more weird than that starlight bath I never experienced. I stepped in the deep night from the frosty bank into a temperature of about 80°.

It was a large shallow lake. I peered into the dark, but I could not see its extent by the dim starlight; no, not even the opposite banks. I swam about until I came to the margin--a mossy, soft margin. Dark branches of trees dipped in the water, and I could feel the fallen leaves floating about. I followed the margin round till the light in my wood cabin dwindled to a mere spark in the distance, then I swam out into the middle of the lake. When I was upright the warm water reached my chin; beneath my feet seemed to be fine sand and gravel. Then leaning my head back I looked up at the Milky Way, and all the expanse of the starlit heavens. There was not a sound; the great suns and planets hung like golden balls above me in the clear air. The star dust of planetary systems--whole universes--stretched away bewilderingly into the unutterable void of boundless immensity, mapping out here and there the trackless thoroughfares of God in the midnight skies. “_Dont la poussière_,” as Lamartine finely writes in oft-plagiarised words, “_sont les Étoiles qui remontent et tombent devant Lui_.”

How long I remained there absorbed in this super-mundane contemplation I cannot say. I felt myself embraced simultaneously by three elements--the warm water, the darkness, and the starlit air. They wove a threefold spell about my senses, whilst my intellect seemed detached, free. Emancipated from earthly trammels, I seemed mounting up and up towards the stars. Suddenly I found myself growing faint, luxuriously faint. My head sank back, my eyes closed, there was a humming as of some distant waterfall in my ears. I seemed falling asleep, pillowed on the warm water, but common sense rescued me just in time. I was alone in an unknown hot lake in New Zealand at night, out of reach of human call. I roused myself with a great effort of will. I had only just time to make for the bank when I grew quite dizzy. The keen frosty air brought me unpleasantly to my senses. My tallow dip was guttering in its socket, and hastily resuming my garments, in a somewhat shivering condition, I retraced the rocky path, then groped my way over the little bridge under which rushed the hot stream that fed the lakelet, and guided only by the dim starlight I regained my hotel.

I had often looked up at the midnight skies before--at Charles’s Wain and the Pleiades on the Atlantic, at the Southern Cross on the Pacific, and the resplendent Milky Way in the Tropics, at Mars and his so-called canals, at “the opal widths of the moon” from the snowy top of Mount Cenis, but never, no, never had I studied astronomy under such extraordinary circumstances and with such peculiar and enchanted environments as on this night at the Waikari hot springs.

_Travel and Talk_ (London and New York, 1896).

THE BIG TREES OF CALIFORNIA

(_UNITED STATES_)