up nearer to the pole, the belt of dusk dividing day from day had been
growing narrower and narrower, until having nearly reached the Arctic
circle, this,--the last night we were to traverse,--had dwindled to a
thread of shadow. Only another half-dozen leagues more, and we would
stand on the threshold of a four months’ day! For the few preceding
hours, clouds had completely covered the heavens, except where a clear
interval of sky, that lay along the northern horizon, promised a
glowing stage for the sun’s last obsequies. But like the heroes of old
he had veiled his face to die, and it was not until he dropped down to
the sea that the whole hemisphere overflowed with glory and the gilded
pageant concerted for his funeral gathered in slow procession round his
grave; reminding one of those tardy honours paid to some great prince
of song, who--left during life to languish in a garret--is buried by
nobles in Westminster Abbey. A few minutes more the last fiery segment
had disappeared beneath the purple horizon, and all was over.
“The king is dead--the king is dead--the king is dead! Long live the
king!” And up from the sea that had just entombed his sire, rose the
young monarch of a new day; while the courtier clouds, in their ruby
robes, turned faces still aglow with the favours of their dead lord, to
borrow brighter blazonry from the smile of a new master.
A fairer or a stranger spectacle than the last Arctic sunset cannot be
well conceived. Evening and morning--like kinsmen whose hearts some
baseless feud has kept asunder--clasping hands across the shadow of the
vanished night.
You must forgive me if sometimes I become a little magniloquent; for
really, amid the grandeur of that fresh primæval world, it was almost
impossible to prevent one’s imagination from absorbing a dash of
the local colouring. We seemed to have suddenly waked up among the
colossal scenery of Keats’s _Hyperion_. The pulses of young Titans beat
within our veins. Time itself,--no longer frittered down into paltry
divisions,--had assumed a more majestic aspect. We had the appetite of
giants,--was it unnatural we should also adopt “the large utterance of
the early gods”?
About 3 A. M. it cleared up a little. By breakfast-time the sun
reäppeared, and we could see five or six miles ahead of the vessel.
It was shortly after this, that as I was standing in the main rigging
peering out over the smooth blue surface of the sea, a white twinkling
point of light suddenly caught my eye about a couple of miles off on
the port bow, which a telescope soon resolved into a solitary isle of
ice, dancing and dipping in the sunlight. As you may suppose, the news
brought everybody upon deck; and when almost immediately afterwards
a string of other pieces--glittering like a diamond necklace--hove in
sight, the excitement was extreme.
Here, at all events, was honest blue salt water frozen solid, and
when--as we proceeded--the scattered fragments thickened, and passed
like silver argosies on either hand, until at last we found ourselves
enveloped in an innumerable fleet of bergs,--it seemed as if we could
never be weary of admiring a sight so strange and beautiful. It was
rather in form and colour than in size that these ice islets were
remarkable; anything approaching to a real iceberg we neither saw, nor
are we likely to see. In fact, the lofty ice mountains that wander like
vagrant islands along the coast of America, seldom or never come to
the eastward or northward of Cape Farewell. They consist of land ice,
and are all generated among the bays and straits within Baffin’s Bay,
and first enter the Atlantic a good deal to the southward of Iceland;
whereas the Polar ice, among which we have been knocking about, is
field ice, and--except when packed one ledge above another, by great
pressure--is comparatively flat. I do not think I saw any pieces
that were piled up higher than thirty or thirty-five feet above the
sea-level, although at a little distance through the mist they may have
loomed much loftier.
In quaintness of form, and in brilliancy of colours, these wonderful
masses surpassed everything I had imagined; and we found endless
amusement in watching their fantastic procession.
At one time it was a knight on horseback, clad in sapphire mail, a
white plume above his casque. Or a cathedral window with shafts of
chrysophras, new powdered by a snowstorm. Or a smooth sheer cliff
of lapis lazuli; or a Banyan tree, with roots descending from its
branches, and a foliage as delicate as the efflorescence of molten
metal; or a fairy dragon, that breasted the water in scales of emerald;
or anything else that your fancy chose to conjure up. After a little
time, the mist again descended on the scene, and dulled each glittering
form to a shapeless mass of white; while in spite of all our endeavours
to keep upon our northerly course, we were constantly compelled to turn
and wind about in every direction--sometimes standing on for several
hours at a stretch to the southward and eastward.
But why should I weary you with the detail of our various manœuvres
during the ensuing days? they were too tedious and disheartening at the
time for me to look back at them with any pleasure. Suffice it to say,
that by dint of sailing north whenever the ice would permit us, and
sailing west when we could not sail north,--we found ourselves on the
2d of August, in the latitude of the southern extremity of Spitzbergen,
though divided from the land by about fifty miles of ice. All this
while the weather had been pretty good, foggy and cold enough, but with
a fine stiff breeze that rattled us along at a good rate whenever we
did get a chance of making any Northing. But lately it had come on to
blow very hard, the cold became quite piercing, and what was worse--in
every direction round the whole circuit of the horizon, except along
its southern segment,--a blaze of iceblink illuminated the sky. A
more discouraging spectacle could not have met our eyes. The iceblink
is a luminous appearance, reflected on the heavens from the fields of
ice that still lie sunk beneath the horizon; it was therefore on this
occasion an unmistakable indication of the encumbered state of the sea
in front of us.
I had turned in for a few hours of rest, and release from the
monotonous sense of disappointment, and was already lost in a dream of
deep bewildering bays of ice, and gulfs whose shifting shores offered
to the eye every possible combination of uncomfortable scenery, without
possible issue,--when “a voice in my dreaming ear” shouted “_Land!_”
and I awoke to its reality. I need not tell you in what double quick
time I tumbled up the companion,--or with what greediness I feasted my
eyes on that longed-for view,--the only sight--as I then thought--we
were ever destined to enjoy of the mountains of Spitzbergen!
The whole heaven was overcast with a dark mantle of tempestuous clouds,
that stretched down in umbrella-like points towards the horizon,
leaving a clear space between their edge and the sea, illuminated by
the sinister brilliancy of the iceblink. In an easterly direction,
this belt of unclouded atmosphere was etherealized to an indescribable
transparency, and up into it there gradually grew--above the dingy line
of starboard ice--a forest of thin lilac peaks, so faint, so pale, that
had it not been for the gem-like distinctness of their outline, one
could have deemed them as unsubstantial as the spires of fairyland.
The beautiful vision proved only too transient; in one short half hour
mist and cloud had blotted it all out, while a fresh barrier of ice
compelled us to turn our backs on the very land we were striving to
reach.
It was one o’clock in the morning of the 6th of August, 1856, that
after having been eleven days at sea, we came to an anchor in the
silent haven of English Bay, Spitzbergen.
And now, how shall I give you an idea of the wonderful panorama in the
midst of which we found ourselves? I think, perhaps, its most striking
feature was the stillness--and deadness--and impossibility of this new
world; ice, and rock, and water surrounded us; not a sound of any kind
interrupted the silence; the sea did not break upon the shore; no bird
or any living thing was visible; the midnight sun--by this time muffled
in a transparent mist--shed an awful, mysterious lustre on glacier and
mountain; no atom of vegetation gave token of the earth’s vitality;
an universal numbness and dumbness seemed to pervade the solitude. I
suppose in scarcely any other part of the world is this appearance of
deadness so strikingly exhibited.
On the stillest summer day in England, there is always perceptible
an undertone of life thrilling through the atmosphere; and though no
breeze should stir a single leaf, yet--in default of motion--there is
always a sense of growth; but here not so much as a blade of grass
was to be seen, on the sides of the bald, excoriated hills. Primeval
rocks--and eternal ice--constitute the landscape.
_Letters from High Latitudes_ (London, 1859).
IN ANTARCTIC SEAS
W. G. BURN MURDOCH
Days such as this are few in a lifetime, so full of interest has it
been, and so fatiguing. Since early morning, rather since yesterday,
for there was no night and no morning, we have been constantly
marvelling at most astonishing and beautiful spectacles. We have been
bathed in red blood, and for hours and hours we have rowed in the boats
and plunged over miles of soft snow dragging seal-skins, and I have
been drawing hard in the times between the boat excursions; but the air
is exhilarating, and we feel equal to almost any amount of work. Sun
and snow-showers alternate--fine hard snow it is, that makes our faces
burn as if before a fire. It is very cold sketching, and incidents and
effects follow each other so rapidly that there is time to make little
more than mental notes.
Christmas Eve.
Those who have felt the peace of a summer night in Norway or Iceland,
where the day sleeps with wide-open eyes, can fancy the quiet beauty of
such a night among the white floes of the Antarctic.
To-day has passed, glistering in silky white, decked with sparkling
jewels of blue and green, and we thought surely we had seen the last of
Nature’s white harmonies; then evening came, pensive and soothing
and grey, and all the white world changed into soft violet, pale
yellow, and rose.
[Illustration: ICE FLOE, ANTARCTIC.]
A dreamy stillness fills the air. To the south the sun has dipped
behind a bank of pale grey cloud, and the sky above is touched with
primrose light. Far to the north the dark, smooth sea is bounded by two
low bergs, that stretch across the horizon. The nearest is cold violet
white, and the sunlight strikes the furthest, making it shine like a
wall of gold. The sky above them is of a leaden peacock blue, with rosy
cloudlets hanging against it--such colouring as I have never before
seen or heard described. To the westward, across the gulf, we can just
distinguish the blue-black crags jutting from the snowy lomonds. Little
clouds touched with gold and rose lie nestling in the black corries,
and gather round the snowy peaks. To the south, in the centre of the
floe, some bergs lie, cold and grey in the shadow of the bank of cloud.
They look like Greek temples imprisoned forever in a field of snow.
A faint cold air comes stealing to us over the floe; it ripples the
yellow sky reflection at the ice-edge for a moment, and falls away.
In the distance a seal is barking--a low muffled sound that travels
far over the calm water, and occasionally a slight splash breaks the
silence, as a piece of snow separates from the field and joins its
companion pieces that are floating quietly past our stern to the
north,--a mysterious, silent procession of soft, white spirits, each
perfectly reflected in the lavender sea.
Nature sleeps--breathlessly--silent; perhaps she dreams of the
spirit-world, that seems to draw so close to her on such a night.
By midnight the tired crew were all below and sound asleep in their
stuffy bunks. But the doctor and I found it impossible to leave the
quiet decks and the mysterious daylight, so we prowled about and brewed
coffee in the deserted galley. Then we watched the sun pass behind the
grey bergs in the south for a few seconds, and appear again, refreshed,
with a cool silvery light. A few flakes of snow floated in the clear,
cold air, and two snowy petrels, white as the snow itself, flitted
along the ice-edge.
A cold, dreamy, white Christmas morning,--beautiful beyond expression.
_From Edinburgh to the Antarctic--An Artist’s Notes and Sketches
during the Dundee Antarctic Expedition of 1892-3_ (London, 1894).
THE DESERT OF SAHARA
(_AFRICA_)
EUGENE FROMENTIN
The Saharans adore their country,[1] and, for my part, I should come
very near justifying a sentiment so impassioned, especially when it
is mingled with the attachment to one’s native soil.... It is a land
without grace or softness, but it is severe, which is not an evil
though its first effect is to make one serious--an effect that many
people confound with weariness. A great land of hills expiring in a
still greater flat land bathed in eternal light; empty and desolate
enough, to give the idea of that surprising thing called the desert;
with a sky almost always the same, silence, and on all sides a
tranquil horizon. In the centre a kind of lost city, surrounded by
solitude; then a little verdure, sandy islets, and, lastly, a few
reefs of whitish calcareous stone or black schists on the margin of
an expanse that resembles the sea;--in all this, but little variety,
few accidents, few novelties, unless it be the sun that rises over the
desert and sinks behind the hills, ever calm, rayless but devouring;
or perhaps the banks of sand that have changed their place and form
under the last wind from the South. Brief dawns, longer noons that are
heavier than elsewhere, and scarcely any twilight; sometimes a sudden
expansion of light and warmth with burning winds that momentarily give
the landscape a menacing physiognomy and that may then produce crushing
sensations; but more usually a radiant immobility, the somewhat
mournful fixity of fine weather, in short, a kind of impassibility that
seems to have fallen from the sky upon lifeless things and from them to
have passed into human faces.
The first impression received from this ardent and inanimate picture,
composed of sun, expanse, and solitude, is acute and cannot be compared
with any other. However, little by little, the eye grows accustomed
to the grandeur of the lines, the emptiness of the space, and the
nakedness of the earth, and if one is still astonished at anything, it
is at still remaining sensible to such slightly changing effects and at
being so deeply stirred by what are in reality the most simple sights.
Here the sky is clear, arid, and unchanging; it comes in contact with
fawn-coloured or white ground, and maintains a frank blue in its
utmost extent; and when it puts on gold opposite the setting sun its
base is violet and almost leaden-hued. I have not seen any beautiful
mirages. Except during the sirocco, the horizon is always distinctly
visible and detached from the sky; there is only a final streak of
ash-blue which is vigorously defined in the morning, but in the middle
of the day is somewhat confounded with the sky and seems to tremble
in the fluidity of the atmosphere. Directly to the South, a great way
off towards M’zab, an irregular line formed by groves of tamarinds is
visible. A faint mirage, that is produced every day in this part of the
desert, makes these groves appear nearer and larger; but the illusion
is not very striking and one needs to be told in order to notice it.
Shortly after sunrise the whole country is rosy, a vivid rose, with
depths of peach colour; the town is spotted with points of shadow, and
some little white argils, scattered along the edge of the palms, gleam
gaily enough in this mournful landscape which for a short moment of
freshness seems to smile at the rising sun. In the air are vague sounds
and a suggestion of singing that makes us understand that every country
in the world has its joyous awakening.
Then, almost at the same moment every day, from the south we hear the
approach of innumerable twitterings of birds. They are the _gangas_
coming from the desert to drink at the springs.... It is then half-past
six. One hour later and the same cries suddenly arise in the north;
the same flocks pass over my head one by one, in the same numbers and
order, and regain their desert plains. One might say that the morning
is ended; and the sole smiling hour of the day has passed between the
going and returning of the _gangas_. The landscape that was rose has
already become dun; the town has far fewer little shadows; it greys as
the sun gets higher; in proportion as it shines brighter the desert
seems to darken; the hills alone remain rosy. If there was any wind
it dies away; warm exhalations begin to spread in the air as if they
were from the sands. Two hours later all movement ceases at once, and
noontide commences.
The sun mounts and is finally directly over my head. I have only the
narrow shelter of my parasol and there I gather myself together; my
feet rest in the sand or on glittering stones; my pad curls up beside
me under the sun; my box of colours crackles like burning wood. Not a
sound is heard now. There are four hours of incredible calm and stupor.
The town sleeps below me then dumb and looking like a mass of violet
with its empty terraces upon which the sun illumines a multitude of
screens full of little rose apricots, exposed there to dry;--here and
there a black hole marks a window, or an interior door, and fine lines
of dark violet show that there are only one or two strips of shadow
in the whole town. A fillet of stronger light that edges the contour
of the terraces helps us to distinguish these mud edifices from one
another, piled as they are rather than built upon their three hills.
On all sides of the town extends the oasis, also dumb and slumbrous
under the heavy heat of the day. It looks quite small and presses
close against the two flanks of the town with an air of wanting to
defend it at need rather than to entice it. I can see the whole of
it: it resembles two squares of leaves enveloped by a long wall like
a park, roughly drawn upon the sterile plain. Although divided by
compartments into a multitude of little orchards, also all enclosed
within walls, seen from this height it looks like a green tablecloth;
no tree is distinguishable, two stages of forest only can be remarked:
the first, round-headed clumps; the second, clusters of palms. At
intervals some meagre patches of barley, only the stubble of which
now remains, form shorn spaces of brilliant yellow amid the foliage;
elsewhere in rare glades a dry, powdery, and ash-coloured ground shows.
Finally, on the south side, a few mounds of sand, heaped by the wind,
have passed over the surrounding wall; it is the desert trying to
invade the gardens. The trees do not move; in the forest thickets we
divine certain sombre gaps in which birds may be supposed to be hidden,
sleeping until their second awakening in the evening.
This is also the hour when the desert is transformed into an obscure
plain. The sun, suspended over its centre, inscribes upon it a circle
of light the equal rays of which fall full upon it in all ways and
everywhere at the same time. There is no longer any clearness or
shadow; the perspective indicated by the fleeting colours almost
ceases to measure distances; everything is covered with a brown tone,
continuous without streaks or mixture; there are fifteen or twenty
leagues of country as uniform and flat as a flooring. It seems that
the most minute salient object should be visible upon it, and yet the
eye discerns nothing there; one could not even say now where there is
sand, earth, or stony places, and the immobility of this solid sea
then becomes more striking than ever. On seeing it start at our feet
and then stretch away and sink towards the South, the East, and the
West without any traced route or inflexion, we ask ourselves what may
be this silent land clothed in a doubtful tone that seems the colour
of the void; whence no one comes, whither no one goes, and which ends
in so straight and clear a strip against the sky;--we do not know; we
feel that it does not end there and that it is, so to speak, only the
entrance to the high sea.
Then add to all these reveries the fame of the names we have seen
upon the map, of places that we know to be there, in such or such
direction, at five, ten, twenty, fifty days’ march, some known, others
only indicated and yet others more and more obscure.... Then the negro
country, the edge of which we only know; two or three names of towns
with a capital for a kingdom; lakes, forests, a great sea on the left,
perhaps great rivers, extraordinary inclemencies under the equator,
strange products, monstrous animals, hairy sheep, elephants, and what
then? Nothing more distinct; unknown distances, an uncertainty, an
enigma. Before me I have the beginning of this enigma and the spectacle
is strange beneath this clear noonday sun. Here is where I should like
to see the Egyptian Sphinx.
[Illustration: THE DESERT OF SAHARA.]
It is vain to gaze around, far or near; no moving thing can be
distinguished. Sometimes by chance, a little convoy of laden camels
appears, like a row of blackish points, slowly mounting the sandy
slopes; we only perceive them when they reach the foot of the hills.
They are travellers; who are they? whence come they? Without our
perceiving them, they have crossed the whole horizon beneath our eyes.
Or perhaps it is a spout of sand which suddenly detaches itself from
the surface like a fine smoke, rises into a spiral, traverses a certain
space bending under the wind and then evaporates after a few seconds.
The day passes slowly; it ends as it began with half rednesses, an
amber sky, depths assuming colour, long oblique flames which will
empurple the mountains, the sands and the eastern rocks in their turn;
shadows take possession of that side of the land that has been fatigued
by the heat during the first half of the day; everything seems to be
somewhat comforted. The sparrows and turtle-doves begin to sing among
the palms; there is a movement as of resurrection in the town; people
show themselves on the terraces and come to shake the sieves; the
voices of animals are heard in the squares, horses neighing as they are
taken to water and camels bellowing; the desert looks like a plate of
gold; the sun sinks over the violet mountains and the night makes ready
to fall.
_Un Été dans le Sahara_ (Paris, 1857).
FOOTNOTE:
[1] The word Sahara does not necessarily convey the idea of a desert
immensity. Inhabited at certain points, it is called _Fiafi_;
habitable at certain others, it takes the name of _Kifar_, a word
whose signification is the same as that of the common word _Khela_,
_abandoned_; habitable and inhabited at yet other points, it is called
_Falat_.
These three words represent each of the characteristics of the Sahara.
_Fiafi_ is the oasis where life retires, about the fountains and wells,
under the palms and fruit trees, sheltered from the sun and _choub_
(simoon).
_Kifar_ is the sandy and void plain, which, however, when fertilized
for a moment by the winter rains, is covered with grass (_a’ cheb_)
in the spring; and the nomadic tribes that ordinarily camp around the
oases go thither to pasture their flocks.
_Falat_, finally, is the sterile and bare immensity, the sea of sand,
whose eternal billows, to-day agitated by the _choub_, to-morrow will
lie in motionless heaps;--the sea that is slowly ploughed by those
fleets called caravans.--General Daumas, _Le Sahara Algérien_.
FINGAL’S CAVE
(_SCOTLAND_)
SIR WALTER SCOTT
July 19, 1810.