Chapter C: F. Gordon-Cumming (1)

At last we entered the true forest-belt, and anything more beautiful you cannot conceive. We forgot our bumps and bruises in sheer delight. Oh the loveliness of those pines and cedars, living or dead! For the dead trees are draped with the most exquisite golden-green lichen, which hangs in festoons many yards in length, and is unlike any other moss or lichen I ever saw. I can compare it to nothing but gleams of sunshine in the dark forest. Then, too, how beautiful are the long arcades of stately columns, red, yellow, or brown, 200 feet in height, and straight as an arrow, losing themselves in their own crown of misty green foliage; and some standing solitary, dead and sunbleached, telling of careless fires, which burnt away their hearts, but could not make them fall!

There are so many different pines and firs, and cedars, that as yet I can scarcely tell one from another. The whole air is scented with the breath of the forests--the aromatic fragrance of resin and of dried cones and pine-needles baked by the hot sun (how it reminds me of Scotch firs!); and the atmosphere is clear and crystalline--a medium which softens nothing, and reveals the farthest distance in sharpest detail. Here and there we crossed deep gulches, where streams (swollen to torrents by the melting snow on the upper hills) rushed down over great boulders and prostrate trees and the victims of the winter gales.

Then we came to quiet glades in the forest, where the soft lawn-like turf was all jewelled with flowers; and the sunlight trickled through the dripping boughs of the feathery Douglas pines, and the jolly little chip-munks played hide-and-seek among the great cedars, and chased one another to the very tops of the tall pitch-pines, which stand like clusters of dark spires, more than 200 feet in height. It was altogether lovely; but I think no one was sorry when we reached a turn in the road, where we descended from the high forest-belt, and crossing a picturesque stream--“Big Creek”--by name--we found ourselves in this comfortable ranch, which takes its name from one of the pioneers of the valley.

We have spent a long day of delight in the most magnificent forest that it is possible to imagine; and I have realized an altogether new sensation, for I have seen the Big Trees of California, and have walked round about them, and inside their cavernous hollows, and have done homage as beseems a most reverent tree-worshipper. They are wonderful--they are stupendous! But as to beauty--no. They shall never tempt me to swerve from my allegiance to my true tree-love--the glorious Deodara forest of the Himalayas.

If size alone were to be considered, undoubtedly the Sequoia stands preëminent, for-to-day we have seen several trees at least three times as large as the biggest Deodara in the cedar shades of Kunai; but for symmetry, and grace, and exquisitely harmonious lines, the “God-given” cedar of Himala stands alone, with its wide spreading, twisted arms, and velvety layers of foliage studded with pale-green cones,--its great red stem supporting a pyramid of green, far more majestic than the diminutive crown of the Big Trees. So at first it was hard to realize that the California cedars are altogether justified in concentrating all their growing power in one steady upward direction, so intent on reaching heaven that they could not afford to throw out one kindly bough to right or left. They remind me of certain rigidly good Pharisees, devoid of all loving sympathies with their fellows, with no outstretched arms of kindly charity--only intent on regulating their own lives by strictest unvarying rule.

Great Towers of Babel they seem to me, straining upward towards the heaven which they will never reach.

There is nothing lovable about a Sequoia. It is so gigantic that I feel overawed by it, but all the time I am conscious that I am comparing it with the odd Dutch trees in a Noah’s Ark, with a small tuft of foliage on the top of a large red stem, all out of proportion. And another unpleasant simile forces itself on my mind--namely, a tall penguin, or one of the wingless birds of New Zealand, with feeble little flaps in place of wings, altogether disproportioned to their bodies.

But this is merely an aside--lest you should suppose that each new land I visit wins my affections from earlier loves. The Deodara forests must ever keep their place in my innermost heart: no sunlight can ever be so lovely as that which plays among their boughs--no sky so blue--no ice-peaks so glittering as those which there cleave the heaven; and I am sure that these poor wretched-looking Digger Indians can never have the same interest for me as the wild Himalayan highlanders--the Paharis--who assemble at the little temples of carved cedar-wood in the Great Forest Sanctuary, to offer their strange sacrifices, and dance in mystic sunwise procession.

Having said this much, I may now sing the praises of a newly found delight, for in truth these forests of the Sierras have a charm of their own, which cannot be surpassed, in the amazing variety of beautiful pines, firs, and cedars of which they are composed. The white fir, the Douglas spruce, sugar-pine, and pitch-pine are the most abundant, and are scattered singly or in singularly picturesque groups over all the mountains hereabouts.

But the Big Trees are only found in certain favoured spots--sheltered places watered by snow-fed streams, at an average of from 5,000 to 7,000 feet above the sea. Eight distinct groves have been discovered, all growing in rich, deep, vegetable mould, on a foundation of powdered granite. Broad gaps lie between the principal groves, and it is observed that these invariably lie in the track of the great ice-rivers, where the accumulation of powdered rock and gravel formed the earliest commencement of the soil, which by slow degrees became rich, and deep, and fertile. There is even reason to believe that these groves are pre-Adamite. A very average tree (only twenty-three feet in diameter) having been felled, its annual rings were counted by three different persons, whose calculations varied from 2,125 to 2,137; and this tree was by no means very aged-looking--probably not half the age of some of its big relations, one of which (on King’s river) is forty-four feet in diameter.

Then, again, some of the largest of these trees are lying prostrate on the ground; and in the ditches formed by their crash, trees have grown up of such a size, and in such a position, as to prove that the fallen giants have lain there for centuries--a thousand years or more; and although partially embedded in the earth, and surrounded by damp forest, their almost imperishable timber is as sound as if newly felled. So it appears that a Sequoia may lie on damp earth for untold ages without showing any symptom of decay. Yet in the southern groves huge prostrate trees are found quite rotten, apparently proving that they must have lain there for an incalculable period.

Of the eight groves aforesaid, the most northerly is Calaveras, and the most southerly is on the south fork of the Tule river. The others are the Stanislaus, the Merced and Crane Flat, the Mariposa, the Fresno, the King’s and Kaweah rivers, and the north fork of the Tule river. It is worthy of note that the more northerly groves are found at the lowest level, Calaveras being only 4,759 feet above the sea, while the Tule and Kaweah belts range over the Sierras at about 7,000 feet.

The number of Sequoias in the northern groves is reckoned to be as follows: Calaveras, ninety trees upwards of fifteen feet in diameter; Stanislaus, or South Calaveras grove, distant six miles from North Calaveras, contains 1,380 trees over one foot in diameter (many of them being over thirty feet in diameter). Mariposa has its 600 Sequoias; and the beautiful Fresno grove, some miles from Mariposa, has 1,200. Merced has fifty, and Tuolumne thirty. The southern belts have not yet been fully explored, but are apparently the most extensive.

The Mariposa grove, where we have been to-day, is the only one which has been reserved by Government as a park for the nation. It lies five miles from here. I should rather say there are two groves. The lower grove lies in a sheltered valley between two mountain-spurs; the upper grove, as its name implies, occupies a higher level, 6,500 feet above the sea.

We breakfasted very early, and by 6 A. M. were in the saddle. Capital, sure-footed ponies were provided for all who chose to ride. Some of the gentlemen preferred walking. From this house we had to ascend about 2,500 feet.

As we gradually worked uphill through the coniferous belts, the trees seemed gradually to increase in size, so that the eye got accustomed by degrees; and when at length we actually reached the Big-Tree grove we scarcely realized that we were in the presence of the race of giants. Only when we occasionally halted at the base of a colossal pillar, somewhere about eighty feet in circumference, and about 250 in height, and compared it with its neighbours, and, above all, with ourselves--poor, insignificant pigmies--could we bring home to our minds a sense of its gigantic proportions.

With all the reverence due to antiquity, we gazed on these Methuselahs of the forest, to whom a few centuries more or less in the record of their long lives are a trifle scarcely worth mentioning. But our admiration was more freely bestowed on the rising generation, the beautiful young trees, only about five or six hundred years of age, and averaging thirty feet in circumference; while still younger trees, the mere children of about a hundred years old, still retain the graceful habits of early youth, and are very elegant in their growth--though, of course, none but mere babies bear the slightest resemblance to the tree as we know it on English lawns.

It really is heartbreaking to see the havoc that has been done by careless fires. Very few of the older trees have escaped scathless. Most of this damage has been done by Indians, who burn the scrub to scare the game, and the fire spreads to the trees, and there smoulders unheeded for weeks, till happily some chance extinguishes it. Many lords of the forest have thus been burnt out, and have at last fallen, and lie on the ground partly embedded, forming great tunnels, hollow from end to end, so that in several cases two horsemen can ride abreast inside the tree from (what was once) its base to its summit.

We halted at the base of the Grizzly Giant, which well deserves its name; for it measures ninety-three feet in circumference, and looks so battered and weather-worn that it probably is about the most venerable tree in the forest. It is one of the most picturesque Sequoias I have seen, just because it has broken through all the rules of symmetry, so rigidly observed by its well conditioned, well-grown brethren; and instead of being a vast cinnamon-coloured column, with small boughs near the summit, it has taken a line of its own, and thrown out several great branches, each about six feet in diameter--in other words, about as large as a fine old English beech-tree!

This poor old tree has a great hollow burnt in it (I think the Indians must have used it as a kitchen), and our half dozen ponies and mules were stabled in the hollow--a most picturesque group. It seems strange to see trees thus scorched and charred, with their insides clean burnt out, yet, on looking far, far overhead, to perceive them crowned with fresh blue-green, as if nothing ailed them, so great is their vitality. Benjamin Taylor says of such a one, “It did not know that it ought to be dead. The tides of life flowed so mightily up that majestic column!”

The Indians say that all other trees grow, but that the Big Trees are the special creation of the Great Spirit. So here too, you see, we have, not tree-worship, but something of the reverence accorded to the cedar in all lands. The Hebrew poet sang of “the trees of the Lord, even the cedars of Lebanon which He hath planted.” And the Hill tribes of Northern India build a rudely carved temple beneath each specially magnificent clump of Deodar, to mark that they are “God’s trees”; while in the sacred Sanskrit poems they are called Deva dara or Deva daru, meaning the gift, the spouse, the word of God, but in any case, denoting the sanctity of the tree.

Whether these Californian Indians had any similar title for their Big Trees, I have failed to learn; but the name by which they are known to the civilized world is that of Sequoyah, a half-caste Cherokee Indian, who distinguished himself by inventing an alphabet and a written language for his tribe. It was a most ingenious alphabet, consisting of eighty-six characters, each representing a syllable, and was so well adapted to its purpose that it was extensively used by the Indians before the white man had ever heard of it. Afterwards it was adopted by the missionaries, who started a printing-press, with types of this character, and issued a newspaper for the Cherokee tribe, by whom this singular alphabet is still used.

When the learned botanist, Endlicher, had to find a suitable name for the lovely redwood cedars, he did honour to Sequoyah, by linking his memory forever with that of the evergreen forests of the Coast Range. And when afterwards these Big Trees of the same race were discovered on the Sierras, they of course were included under the same family name.

_Granite Crags_ (Edinburgh and London, 1884).

GERSOPPA FALLS

(_INDIA_)

W. M. YOOL

These, the most famous falls in India, are situated on the Siruvatti (or _Sharavati_) river, which at that part of its course forms the boundary between the north-west corner of the native state of Mysore and the Bombay Presidency. The source of the river is in Mysore, half-way up Koda Chadri, a hill about five thousand feet high, near the famous old town of Nuggur, once the seat of the Rajahs of Mysore, where are still to be seen the ruins of an old fort and palace, and the walls of the town, eight miles in circumference.

The natives have a legend that the god Rama shot an arrow from his bow on to Koda Chadri, and that the river sprang from the spot where the arrow fell, and hence the name Siruvatti or “arrow-born.” From its source the river flows north for nearly thirty miles through the heart of the Western Ghauts, and then turns west and flows down through the jungles of North Canara to the Indian Ocean--another thirty miles. Shortly after taking the bend westwards there comes the fall, which, on account of its height, is worthy of being reckoned amongst the great waterfalls of the world. Here, at one leap, the river falls eight hundred and thirty feet; and as, at the brink, it is about four hundred yards wide, there are few, if any, falls in the world to match it.

During the dry weather the river comes over in four separate falls, but in the height of the monsoon these become one, and as at that time the water is nearly thirty feet deep, the sight must be truly one of the world’s wonders. It has been calculated that in flood-time more horse-power is developed by the Gersoppa Falls than by Niagara. This of course is from the much greater height of Gersoppa, eight hundred and thirty feet against about one hundred and sixty feet of Niagara, although the Niagara Falls are much wider and vaster in volume. The Kaieteur Falls of the Essequibo in British Guiana are seven hundred and forty-one feet sheer and eighty-eight more of sloping cataract, but the river there is only one hundred yards wide. At the Victoria Falls, the Zambesi, one thousand yards wide, falls into an abyss four hundred feet deep.

My friend and I visited the falls in the end of September, about a month after the close of the monsoon, when there were four falls with plenty of water in them. The dry weather is the best for the sight-seer, as, during the monsoon, the rain is so heavy and continuous that there would not be much pleasure in going there, although doubtless the sight would be grander and more awe-inspiring. The drainage area above the falls is seven hundred and fifty square miles, and the average yearly rainfall over this tract is two hundred and twenty inches, nearly the whole of which falls in the three monsoon months, June, July, August; so it can be imagined what an enormous body of water comes down the river in these months. There is a bungalow for the use of visitors on the Bombay side of the river, about a hundred yards away from the falls, built on the very brink of the precipice overhanging the gorge through which the river flows after taking the leap. So close to the edge is it that one could jump from the veranda sheer into the bed of the river nearly a thousand feet below.

The four falls are called _The Rajah_, _The Roarer_, _The Rocket_, and _La Dame Blanche_. The _Rajah_ and _Roarer_ fall into a horseshoe-shaped cavern, while the _Rocket_ and _La Dame Blanche_ come over where the precipice is at right angles to the flow of the river, and are very beautiful falls. The _Rajah_ comes over with a rush, shoots clear out from the rock, and falls one unbroken column of water the whole eight hundred and thirty feet. The _Roarer_ comes rushing at an angle of sixty degrees down a huge furrow in the rock for one hundred and fifty feet, making a tremendous noise, then shoots right out into the middle of the horseshoe, and mingles its waters with those of the _Rajah_ about half-way down. The _Rocket_ falls about two hundred feet in sheer descent on to a huge knob of rock, where it is dashed into spray, which falls in beautiful smoky rings, supposed to resemble the rings formed by the bursting of rockets. _La Dame Blanche_, which my friend and I thought the most beautiful, resembles a snow-white muslin veil falling in graceful folds, and clothing the black precipice from head to foot.

From the bungalow a fine view is got of the _Rocket_ and _La Dame Blanche_, and when the setting sun lights up these falls and forms numerous rainbows in the spray, it makes an indescribably beautiful scene. Here one is alone with Nature, not a house or patch of cultivation anywhere. In front is the river, and all around are mountains and primeval forests, while the ceaseless roar of the waterfall adds a grandeur and a solemnity not easily described.

Near where the _Rajah_ goes over is a projecting rock called the _Rajah’s Rock_, so named because one of the Rajahs of Nuggur tried to build a small pagoda on it, but before being finished, it was washed away. The cutting in the rock for the foundation is still visible. To any one who has a good head, a fine view of the horseshoe cavern can be had from this rock. The plan is to lie down on your stomach, crawl to the edge, and look over, when you can see straight down into the pool where the waters are boiling and seething nearly a thousand feet below. I took a few large stones to the edge and dropped them over, but they were lost to view long before they reached the bottom. It was quite an appreciable time after my losing sight of them before I observed the faint splash they made near the edge of the pool.

In order to get to the foot of the falls it is necessary to cross the river to the Mysore side, as there is no possibility of getting down to the Bombay side. About half a mile above the falls there is a canoe, dug out of the trunk of a tree, which belongs to the native who looks after the bungalow, and ferries people across. A path has been made to enable visitors to get to the foot of the falls, and many fine views of all four are got while descending. The first half of the way down is fairly easy, but after that the track is a succession of steps down great boulders and across slabs of rock, rendered as slippery as ice by the constant spray. Ere my friend and I reached the bottom we were soaking wet, and realized when too late that we should have left the greater part of our clothes behind us. By going to the bottom a much better idea of the immense height of the falls is got, and the climb up again helps still more to make one realize it. From the bungalow the largest rocks in the bed of the river looked like sheep; but we found them to be huge boulders, ten and twelve feet high and about twenty feet across.

The falls seem to have become known to Europeans about 1840, but were very seldom visited in those days. Even now the number of visitors is small, as the nearest railway is eighty miles off, and there is no way of procuring supplies with the exception of a little milk and a chicken to be had from the above-mentioned native.

For a good many years there was great uncertainty about the height of the falls, but the question was finally set at rest by two naval lieutenants who plumbed them in 1857. The _modus operandi_ was as follows: Their ship being off the coast near the mouth of the river, they got a cable transported to the falls, and stretched it across the horseshoe--a distance of seventy-four yards. Having seen that the cable was properly secured at both ends, they got a cage fixed on, and one of them got into it and was hauled out until he was in the centre. From the cage he let down a sounding line with a buoy attached to the end of it, and found the depth to the surface of the water to be eight hundred and thirty feet. After satisfactorily accomplishing this feat, they proceeded to the foot of the falls, and constructed a raft so as to plumb the pools, which they did, and found the greatest depth to be one hundred and thirty-two feet. This was done near the end of the dry weather, when there was very little water in the river, and they were able to temporarily divert the _Rajah_ and _Roarer_ into the _Rocket_, without doing which it would have been impossible to plumb the horseshoe pool--the deepest one--satisfactorily.

About a mile from the bungalow is a hill called Nishani Goodda or Cairn Hill, from the top of which a magnificent view of the surrounding country is got. To the east lie the table-lands of the Deccan and Mysore, the flat expanse broken here and there by an occasional hill. North and south stretches the chain of the Ghauts, rising peak after peak as far as the eye can see (Koda Chadri, where the Siruvatti rises, being very conspicuous); while to the west one looks down on the lowlands of jungle-covered Canara, with glimpses of the river here and there, and beyond them gleams the Indian Ocean.

The bungalow book in which visitors inscribe their names is very interesting reading. The records go back to 1840, and many travellers have written a record of what they did when there; while a few, inspired by the scene, have expressed their feelings in poetry, some of it well worth copying and preserving by any one who has seen the falls.

_Chambers’ Journal_ (London, 1896).

ETNA

(_SICILY_)

ALEXANDRE DUMAS

The word Etna, according to the _savants_, is a Phœnician word meaning the _mouth of the furnace_. The Phœnician language, as you see, was of the order of that one spoken of by Covielle to the _Bourgeois Gentilhomme_, which expressed many things in a few words. Many poets of antiquity pretend that it was the spot where Deucalion and Pyrrha took refuge during the flood. Upon this score, Signor Gemellaro, who was born at Nicolosì, may certainly claim the honour of having descended in a direct line from one of the first stones which they threw behind them. That would leave, as you see, the Montmorencys, the Rohans, and the Noailles, far behind.

Homer speaks of Etna, but he does not designate it a volcano. Pindar calls it one of the pillars of the sky. Thucydides mentions three great explosions, from the epoch of the arrival of the Grecian colonies up to his own lifetime. Finally, there were two eruptions in the time of Denys; then they followed so rapidly that only the most violent ones have been counted.[10]

Since the eruption of 1781, Etna has had some little desire to overthrow Sicily; but, as these caprices have not had serious results, Etna may be is permitted to stand upon what it has accomplished--it is unique in its self-respect--and to maintain its eminence as a volcano.

Of all these eruptions, one of the most terrible was that of 1669. As the eruption of 1669 started from Monte Rosso, and as Monte Rosso is only half a mile to the left of Nicolosì, we took our way, Jadin and I, to visit the crater, after having promised Signor Gemellaro to come to dinner with him.

It must be understood beforehand that Etna regards itself too far above ordinary volcanos to proceed in their fashion: Vesuvius, Stromboli, and even Hekla pour the lava over their craters, just as wine spills over a too-full glass; Etna does not give itself this trouble. Its crater is only a crater for show, which is content to play cup and ball with incandescent rocks large as ordinary houses, which one follows in their aërial ascension as one would follow a bomb issuing from a mortar; but, during this time the force of the eruption is really felt elsewhere. In reality, when Etna is at work, it throws up very simply upon its shoulders, at one place or another, a kind of boil about the size of Montmartre; then this boil breaks, and out of it streams a river of lava which follows the slope, descends, burning, or overturning everything that it finds before it, and ends by extinguishing itself in the sea. This method of procedure is the cause of Etna’s being covered with a number of little craters which are formed like immense hay-mows; each of these secondary volcanos has its date and its own name, and all have occasioned in their time, more or less noise and more or less ravage.

We got astride of our mounts and started on our way upon a night that seemed to us of terrible darkness as we issued from a well-lighted room; but, by degrees, we began to distinguish the landscape, thanks to the light of the myriads of stars that sprinkled the sky. It seemed from the way in which our mules sank beneath us that we were crossing sand. Soon we entered the second region, or the forest region, that is if the few scattered, poor, and crooked trees merit the name of forest. We marched about two hours, confidently following the road our guide took us, or rather our mules, a road which, moreover, to judge by the eternal declivities and ascents, seemed terribly uneven. Already, we realized the wisdom of Signor Gemellaro’s provisions against the cold, and we wrapped ourselves in our hooded great-coats a full hour before we arrived at a kind of roofless hovel where our mules stopped of themselves. We were at the _Casa del Bosco_ or _della Neve_, that is to say, the _Forest_ or the _Snow_, names which it merits in either summer or winter. Our guide told us this was our halting-place. Upon his invitation, we alighted and entered. We were half-way on the road to the _Casa Inglese_.

During our halt the sky was enriched by a crescent, which, although slender, gave us a little light. We continued to march a quarter of an hour longer between trees which became scarcer every twenty feet and finally disappeared altogether. We were about to enter the third region of Etna, and we knew from the steps of the mules when they were passing over lava, crossing ashes, or when they trampled a kind of moss, the only vegetation that creeps up to this point. As for our eyes, they were of very little use, the sheen appearing to us more or less coloured, and that was all, for we could not distinguish a single detail in the midst of this darkness.

However, in proportion as we ascended, the cold became more intense, and, notwithstanding our cloaks, we were freezing. This change of temperature had checked conversation, and each of us, occupied in trying to keep himself warm, advanced in silence. I led the way, and if I could not see the ground on which we advanced, I could distinguish perfectly on our right the gigantic escarpments and the immense peaks, that reared themselves like giants, and whose black silhouettes stood out boldly upon the deep blue of the sky. The further we advanced, the stranger and more fantastic shapes did these apparitions assume; we well understood that Nature had not originally made these mountains as they are and that it was a long contest that had ravaged them. We were upon the battle-field of the Titans; we clambered over Pelion piled upon Ossa.

All this was terrible, sombre, and majestic; I saw and I felt thoroughly the poetry of this nocturnal trip, and meanwhile I was so cold that I had not the courage to exchange a word with Jadin to ask him if all these visions were not the result of the weakness that I experienced, and if I were not dreaming. From time to time strange and unfamiliar noises, that did not resemble in the slightest degree any noises that one is accustomed to hear, started from the bowels of the earth, and seemed to moan and wail like a living being. These noises had something so unexpectedly lugubrious and solemn about them that they made your blood run cold.... We walked about three-quarters of an hour upon the steep and rough road, then we found ourselves upon a slightly inclined slope where every now and then we crossed large patches of snow and in which I was plunged up to my knees, and these finally became continuous. At length the dark vault of the sky began to pale and a feeble twilight illumined the ground upon which we walked, bringing with it air even more icy than we had heretofore breathed. In this wan and uncertain light we perceived before us something resembling a house; we approached it, Jadin trotting upon his mule, and I coming as fast as possible. The guide pushed open the door and we found ourselves in the _Casa Inglese_, built at the foot of the cone, for the great relief of travellers.

It was half-past three o’clock in the morning; our guide reminded us that we had still three-quarters of an hour’s climb at least, and, if we wished to reach the top of the cone before sunrise, we had not a moment to lose.

We left the _Casa Inglese_. We began to distinguish objects: all around us extended a vast field of snow, in the centre of which, making an angle of about forty-five degrees, the cone of Etna rose. Above us all was in darkness; towards the east only a light tint of opal coloured the sky on which the mountains of Calabria were vigorously outlined.

At a hundred feet from the _Casa Inglese_ we encountered the first waves of the lava plateau whose black hue did not accord with the snow, in the midst of which it rose like a sombre island. We had to mount these solid waves, jumping from one to another, as I had done at Chamouni and the Mer de Glace, with this difference, that the sharp edges tore the leather of our shoes and cut our feet. This passage, which lasted a quarter of an hour, was one of the most trying of the route.

We were now about a third of the way up, and we had only taken about half an hour to ascend four hundred feet; the east brightened more and more; the fear of not arriving at the summit of the cone in time to see the sunrise lent us courage, and we started again with new enthusiasm, without pausing to look at the immense horizon which widened beneath our feet at each step; but the further we advanced, the more the difficulties increased; at each step the slope became more abrupt, the earth more friable, and the air rarer. Soon, on our right, we began to hear subterranean roarings that attracted our attention; our guide walked in front of us and led us to a fissure from which came a great noise and a thick sulphurous smoke blown out by an interior current of air. Approaching the edges of this cleft, we saw at an unfathomable depth a bottom of incandescent and red liquid; and when we stamped our feet, the ground resounded in the distance like a drum. Happily it was perfectly calm, for if the wind had blown this smoke over to our side, we should have been asphyxiated, for it is charged with a terrible fumes of sulphur.

We found ourselves opposite the crater,--an immense well, eight miles in circumference and 900 feet deep; the walls of this excavation were covered with scarified matter of sulphur and alum from top to bottom; in the bottom as far as we could see at the distance from where we stood, there was some matter in eruption, and from the abyss there ascended a tenuous and tortuous smoke, resembling a gigantic serpent standing on his tail. The edges of the crater were cut out irregularly at a greater or less height. We were at one of the highest points.

Our guide permitted us to look at this sight for a moment, holding us back, however, every now and then by our clothing when we approached too near the precipice, for the rock is so friable that it could easily give way beneath our feet, and we should repeat the joke of Empedocles; then he asked us to remove ourselves about twenty feet from the crater to avoid all accidents, and to look around us.

The east, whose opal tints we had noticed when leaving the _Casa Inglese_, had changed to tender rose, and was now inundated with the flames of the sun whose disc we began to perceive above the mountains of Calabria. Upon the sides of these mountains of a dark and uniform blue, the towns and villages stood out like little white points. The strait of Messina seemed a simple river, while to the right and left we saw the sea like an immense mirror. To the left, this mirror was spotted with several black dots: these black dots were the islands of the Lipariote archipelago. From time to time one of these islands glimmered like an intermittent light-house; this was Stromboli, throwing out flames. In the west, everything was in darkness. The shadow of Etna cast itself over all Sicily.

For three-quarters of an hour the spectacle did nothing but gain in magnificence. I have seen the sun rise on Rigi and the Faulhorn, those two Titans of Switzerland: nothing is comparable to the view on Etna’s summit; Calabria from Pizzo to Cape dell Armi, the pass from Scylla to Reggio, the Tyrrhenian Sea, the Ionian Sea and the Æolian Islands that seem within reach of your hand; to the right, Malta floating on the horizon like a light mist; around us the whole of Sicily, seen from a bird’s-eye view with its shores denticulated with capes, promontories, harbours, creeks and roads; its fifteen cities and three hundred villages; its mountains which seem like hills; its valleys which we know are furrowed with ploughs; its rivers which seem threads of silver, as in autumn they fall from the sky to the grasses of the meadows; and, finally, the immense roaring crater, full of flames and smoke, overhead Heaven and at its feet Hell: such a spectacle, made us forget fatigue, danger, and suffering. I admired it all without reservation, with my eyes and my soul. Never had God seemed so near and, consequently, so great.

We remained there an hour, dominating all the old world of Homer, Virgil, Ovid, and Theocritus, without the idea of touching a pencil occurring to Jadin or myself, until it seemed to us that this picture had entered deeply into our hearts and remained graven there without the aid of ink or sketch. Then we threw a last glance over this horizon of three hundred leagues, a sight seen once in a lifetime, and we began our descent.

_Le Speronare: Impressions de Voyage_ (Paris, 1836.)

FOOTNOTE:

[10] The principal eruptions of Etna took place in the year 662, B. C., and in A. D. 225, 420, 812, 1169, 1285, 1329, 1333, 1408, 1444, 1446, 1447, 1536, 1603, 1607, 1610, 1614, 1619, 1634, 1669, 1682, 1688, 1689, 1702, 1766, and 1781.

PIKE’S PEAK AND THE GARDEN OF THE GODS

(_UNITED STATES_)

IZA DUFFUS HARDY

Colorado Springs--so called because the springs are at Manitou, five miles off, is a prairie town on a plateau six thousand feet high, above which Pike’s Peak stands sentinel, lifting his snow-capped head fourteen thousand feet into the clear depths of azure light, in which no fleck of cloud floats from morn to night and night to morn again. It is April, and not a drop of rain has fallen since the previous August. Mid-April, and not a leaf upon a tree. Not a flower or a bird seems to flourish here. No spring-blossom scents the keen fresh life-giving air; no warbler soars high up into the stainless sapphire sky. The leafless cottonwood trees stand out white in the flood of sunlight like trees of silver, their delicate bare branches forming a shining tangle of silvery network against that intense blue background.

The place all looks bleak and barren to us; the wild grandeur of the mountains is unrelieved by the rich shadows of the pine forests or the sunny green glints of meadows that soften Alpine scenery. No flower gardens, no smiling valleys, no velvet turf, no fragrant orchards, no luxuriant hedge rows; only the lonely mountain range, the crowning height of Pike’s Peak stern and solitary in his icy exaltation, and the dead level of the prairie, stretching away eastward for hundreds and hundreds of miles, declining always at a gradual and imperceptible angle till it slopes down to the very banks of the great Mississippi, over a thousand miles away.

But, although the spot does not seem altogether a Paradise to us, it is a veritable Eden for consumptive invalids. Here they come to find again the lost angel of Health, and seldom seek again, unless they come too late. People live here who can live nowhere else. They long to return to their far-off homes; but home to them means death. They must live in this Colorado air, or die. There is a snake in the grass of this Eden, where they have drunk the elixir of a new life, and its name is Nostalgia. They long--some of them--for the snowy winters and flowery summers of their eastern homes. Others settle happily and contentedly in the endless sunshine of winterless, summerless Colorado.

We rattled along cheerily in our light spring-waggon over the smooth, fine roads, viewing the landscape from beneath the parasols which only partially shielded us from the blazing sun. Although the gentleman from Tennessee preserved a truly western taciturnity, our driver beguiled the way with instructive and amusing converse. He pointed out to us, flourishing by the wayside, the soap-weed, whose root is a perfect substitute for soap, and taught us to distinguish between the blue joint-grass--yellow as hay in winter, but now taking on its hue of summer green--and the greyish neutral-tinted buffalo-grass, which is most succulent and nutritious, although its looks belie it, for a less tempting-looking herb I never had the pleasure of seeing. He also pointed out the dead body of a cow lying on a desolate plain, and informed us it would dry up to a mummy in no time; it was the effect of the air; dead cattle speedily mummified, and were no nuisance. Another dried-up bovine skeleton bore witness to the truth of his assertion.

We observed that the soil looked barren as desert sand; but he replied that it only required irrigation to be extremely fertile, showed us the irrigating ditches cut across the meadows, and described to us some of the marvellous productions of Colorado--a single cabbage-head weighing forty pounds, etc. He told us of the wondrous glories of the Arkansas cañon and the Mount of the Holy Cross--which, alas! we were not to see, the roads thither being as yet rough travelling for ladies. He sang the praises of the matchless climate, and the joys of the free, healthful life, far from the enervating and deteriorating influences of great cities. Indeed, it appeared from his conversation that nowhere on the face of the habitable globe could there be found any spot even remotely emulating the charms of Colorado--an opinion shared by every Coloradian with whom we held any intercourse.

Our way then led up the Ute Pass, once, in days not so far back frequented by the Ute Indians. Now, not an Indian is to be seen for miles; they have all been swept back on to a reservation, and the story of the Ute outbreak there of the past autumn is yet fresh in the minds of all. The Ute Pass is a winding, uphill road along the side of a deep cañon, the rocks here and there overhanging it threateningly, and affording a welcome shade from the piercing sun-rays, which follow us even here. The steep walls of the cañon are partly clothed and crowned with pine-trees, and along its depths a rapid, sparkling stream bubbles and leaps over the rocks and boulders.

Up the pass a waggon-train is toiling on its way to the great new mining centre--the giant baby city--Leadville, the youngest and most wonderful child of the prolific west! In this train we get entangled, and move slowly along with it--waggons and cattle before us, waggons and cattle behind us--tourists, teamsters, miners, drivers, drovers, dogs, all huddled together in seemingly inextricable confusion.

At the top of the pass, we tourists turn: and, while the waggon-train plods on its slow way, we make the best of our way back down the hill, and take the road to the Garden of the Gods.

Why the _Garden_ of the Gods? I do not myself perceive the appropriateness of the appellation. There is not a flower in sight; only a few stunted shrubs, and forlorn-looking, thin trees. It is a natural enclosure, of fifty or more acres, such as in Colorado is called a “park,” scattered with rocks of a rich red hue, and the wildest and most grotesque shapes imaginable.

The giants might have made it their playground, and left their playthings around them. Here, tossed and flung about as if by a careless hand, lie the huge round boulders with which they played at ball. Here they amused themselves by balancing an immense mass of stone on a point so cunningly that it has stood there for centuries looking as if a touch would overturn it. There they have hewn a high rock into the rough semblance of a veiled woman--here they have sculptured a man in a hat--there piled up a rude fortress, and there built a church.

But the giants have deserted their playground ages ago, and trees have grown up between the fantastic formations they left. It is a strange weird scene, and suggested to us forcibly that if we would “view it aright” we should

“Go view it by the pale moonlight!”

How spectral those strange shapes would look in the gloom! What ghostly life would seem to breathe in them when the white moonbeams bathed their eerie outlines in her light! There is a something lost in the Garden of the Gods to us who only saw it with a flood of sunshine glowing on its ruddy rocks. Most of these have been christened according to their form--the Nun, the Scotchman, the Camel, and so on.

Two huge walls of red and white stone, rising perpendicularly a sheer three hundred feet, form the gate of the Garden. Through this colossal and for-ever-open gate we looked back with a sigh of farewell--our glimpse of the scene seemed so brief!--and we half-fancied that the veiled Nun bowed her dark head in the sunshine in parting salute as we were whirled out of sight.

_Between Two Oceans, or Sketches of American Travel_ (London, 1884).

THE GREAT GEYSIR OF ICELAND

SIR RICHARD F. BURTON

On the eastern slope of the Frachytic pile and extending round the north of the rock-wall are the Hvers and Geysirs. Nothing can be meaner than their appearance, especially to the tourist who travels as usual from Reykjavik; nothing more ridiculous than the contrast of this pin’s point, this atom of pyritic formation, with the gigantic theory which it was held to prove, earth’s central fire, the now obsolete dream of classical philosophers and “celebrated academicians”; nothing more curious than the contrast between Nature and Art, between what we see in life and what we find in travellers’ illustrations. Sir John Stanley, perpetuated by Henderson, first gave consistence to the popular idea of “that most wonderful fountain, the Great Geysir;” such is the character given to it by the late Sir Henry Holland, a traveller who belonged to the “wunderbar” epoch of English travel, still prevalent in Germany. From them we derive the vast background of black mountain, the single white shaft of fifty feet high, domed like the popular pine-tree of Vesuvian smoke, the bouquet of water, the Prince of Wales feathers, double-plumed and triple-plumed, charged with stones; and the minor jets and side squirts of the foreground, where pigmies stand and extend the arm of illustration and the hand of marvel.

On this little patch, however, we may still study the seven forms of Geysir life. First, is the baby still sleeping in the bosom of Mother Earth, the airy wreath escaping from the hot clay ground; then comes the infant breathing strongly, and at times puking in the nurse’s lap; third, is the child simmering with impatience; and fourth, is the youth whose occupation is to boil over. The full-grown man is represented by the “Great Gusher” in the plenitude of its lusty power; old age, by the tranquil, sleepy “laug”; and second childhood and death, mostly from diphtheria or quinsy, in the empty red pits strewed about the dwarf plain. “Patheticum est!” as the old scholiast exclaimed.

It is hardly fair to enter deeply in the history of the Great Geysir, but a few words may be found useful. The silence of Ari Fródi (A. D., 1075), and of the Landnámabók, so copious in its details, suggests that it did not exist in the Eleventh Century; and the notice of Saxo Grammaticus in the preface to his History of Denmark proves that it had become known before the end of the Thirteenth. Hence it is generally assumed that the volcanic movements of A. D., 1294, which caused the disappearance of many hot springs, produced those now existing. Forbes clearly proved the growth of the tube by deposition of silex on the lips; a process which will end by sealing the spring: he placed its birth about 1060 years ago, which seems to be thoroughly reasonable; and thus for its manhood we have a period of about six centuries.

In 1770 the Geyser spouted eleven times a day; in 1814 it erupted every six hours; and in 1872 once between two and a week. Shepherd vainly wasted six days; a French party seven; and there are legends of a wasted fortnight.

Remains now only to walk over the ground, which divides itself into four separate patches: the extinct, to the north-west, below and extending round the north of the Laugarfjall buttress; the Great Geysir; the Strokkr and the Thikku-hverar to the south.

In the first tract earth is uniformly red, oxidized by air, not as in poetical Syria by the blood of Adonis. The hot, coarse bolus, or trachytic clay, soft and unctuous, astringent, and adhering to the tongue is deposited in horizontal layers, snowy-white, yellow-white, ruddy, light-blue, blue-grey, mauve, purple, violet, and pale-green are the Protean tints; often mixed and mottled, the effect of alum, sulphuric acid, and the decomposition of bisulphide of iron. The saucer of the Great Geysir is lined with Geysirite (silica hydraté), beads or tubercles of grey-white silica; all the others want these fungi or coral-like ornaments. The dead and dying springs show only age-rusty moulds and broken-down piles, once chimneys and ovens, resembling those of Reykir, now degraded and deformed to countless heaps of light and dark grey. Like most of the modern features, they drained to the cold rivulet on the east, and eventually to the south. The most interesting feature is the Blesi (pronounced _Blese_), which lies 160 feet north of the Great Geysir. This hot-water pond, a Grotto Azurra, where cooking is mostly done, lies on a mound, and runs in various directions. To the north it forms a dwarf river-valley flowing west of the Great Geysir; eastward it feeds a hole of bubbling water which trickles in a streak of white sinter to the eastern rivulet and a drip-hole, apparently communicating underground with an ugly little boiler of grey-brown, scum-streaked, bubbling mud, foul-looking as a drain. The “beautiful quiescent spring” measures forty feet by fifteen,[11] and is of reniform or insect shape, the waist being represented by a natural arch of stone spanning the hot blue depths below the stony ledges which edge them with scallops and corrugations. Hence the name; this bridge is the “blaze” streaking a pony’s face. Blesi was not sealed by deposition of silex; it suddenly ceased to erupt in A. D., 1784, the year after the Skaptár convulsion, a fact which suggests the origin of the Geysirs. It is Mackenzie’s “cave of blue water”; and travellers who have not enjoyed the _lapis lazuli_ of the Capri grotto, indulge in raptures about its colouration. North-west of the Blesi, and distant 200 feet, is another ruin, situated on a much higher plane and showing the remains of a large silicious mould: it steams, but the breath of life comes feebly and irregularly. This is probably the “Roaring Geysir” or the “Old Geysir,” which maps and plans place eighty yards from the Great Geysir.

The Great Geysir was unpropitious to us, yet we worked hard to see one of its expiring efforts. An Englishman had set up a pyramid at the edge of the saucer, and we threw in several hundredweights, hoping that the silex, acted upon by the excessive heat, might take the effect of turf; the only effects were a borborygmus which sounded somewhat like B’rr’rr’t, and a shiver as if the Foul Fiend had stirred the depths. The last eruption was described to us as only a large segment of the tube, not exceeding six feet in diameter. About midnight the veteran suffered slightly from singultus. On Monday the experts mispredicted that he would exhibit between 8 and 9 A. M., and at 1 A. M. on Tuesday there was a trace of second-childhood life. After the usual eructation, a general bubble, half veiled in white vapour, rose like a gigantic glass-shade from the still surface, and the troubled water trickled down the basin sides in miniature boiling cascades. There it flowed eastwards by a single waste-channel which presently forms a delta of two arms, the base being the cold, rapid, and brawling rivulet; the northern fork has a dwarf “force,” used as a _douche_, and the southern exceeds it in length, measuring some 350 paces.

We were more fortunate with the irascible Strokkr, whose name has been generally misinterpreted. Dillon calls it the piston, or “churning-staff”; and Barrow the “shaker”: it is simply the “hand-churn” whose upright shaft is worked up and down--the churn-like column of water suggested the resemblance. This feature, perhaps the “New Geysir” of Sir John Stanley and Henderson, formerly erupted naturally, and had all the amiable eccentricity of youth: now it must be teased or coaxed. Stanley gave it 130 feet of jet, or 36 higher than the Great Geysir; Henderson 50 to 80; Symington, 100 to 150 feet; Bryson, “upwards of a hundred”; and Baring-Gould, “rather higher than the Geysir.” We found it lying 275 feet (Mackenzie 131 yards) south of the big brother, of which it is a mean replica. The outer diameter of the saucer is only seven feet, the inner about eighteen; and it is too well drained by its silex-floored channel ever to remain full.