extraordinary places I ever beheld. It exceeded, in my mind, every
description I had heard of it; or rather, the appearance of the
cavern, composed entirely of basaltic pillars as high as the roof of
a cathedral,[2] and the running deep into the rock, eternally swept
by a deep and swelling sea, and paved as it were with ruddy marble,
baffles all description. You can walk along the broken pillars, with
some difficulty, and in some places with a little danger, as far as
the farthest extremity. Boats also can come in below when the sea is
placid,--which is seldom the case. I had become a sort of favourite
with the Hebridean boatmen, I suppose from my anxiety about their old
customs, and they were much pleased to see me get over the obstacles
which stopped some of the party. So they took the whim of solemnly
christening a great stone at the mouth of the cavern, Clachan-an
Bairdh, or the Poet’s Stone. It was consecrated with a pibroch, which
the echoes rendered tremendous, and a glass of whisky, not poured forth
in the ancient mode of libation, but turned over the throats of the
assistants. The head boatman, whose father had been himself a bard,
made me a speech on the occasion; but as it was in Gaelic, I could only
receive it as a silly beauty does a fine-spun compliment--bow, and say
nothing.
When this fun was over (in which, strange as it may seem, the
men were quite serious), we went to Iona, where there are some
ancient and curious monuments. From this remote island the light of
Christianity shone forth on Scotland and Ireland. The ruins are of
a rude architecture, but curious to the antiquary. Our return was
less comfortable; we had to row twenty miles against an Atlantic tide
and some wind, besides the pleasure of seeing occasional squalls
gathering to windward. The ladies were sick, especially poor Hannah
Mackenzie, and none of the gentlemen escaped except Staffa and myself.
The men, however, cheered by the pipes, and by their own interesting
boat-songs, which were uncommonly wild and beautiful, one man leading
and the others answering in chorus, kept pulling away without
apparently the least sense of fatigue, and we reached Ulva at ten at
night, tolerably wet, and well disposed for bed.
The haze and dullness of the atmosphere seem to render it dubious if
we can proceed, as we intended, to Staffa to-day--for mist among these
islands is rather unpleasant. Erskine reads prayers on deck to all
hands, and introduces a very apt allusion to our being now in sight
of the first Christian Church from which Revelation was diffused over
Scotland and all its islands. There is a very good form of prayer for
the Lighthouse Service composed by the Rev. Mr. Brunton. A pleasure
vessel lies under our lee from Belfast, with an Irish party related to
Macneil of Colonsay. The haze is fast degenerating into downright rain,
and that right heavy--verifying the words of Collins--
“And thither where beneath the _showery west_
The mighty Kings of three fair realms are laid.”[3]
After dinner, the weather being somewhat cleared, sailed for Staffa,
and took boat. The surf running heavy up between the island and
the adjacent rock, called Booshala, we landed at a creek near the
Cormorant’s cave. The mist now returned so thick as to hide all view
of Iona, which was our landmark; and although Duff, Stevenson, and
I, had been formerly on the isle, we could not agree upon the
proper road to the cave. I engaged myself, with Duff and Erskine, in
a clamber of great toil and danger, and which at length brought me to
the _Cannon-ball_, as they call a round granite stone moved by the sea
up and down in a groove of rock, which it has worn for itself, with
a noise resembling thunder. Here I gave up my research, and returned
to my companions, who had not been more fortunate. As night was now
falling, we resolved to go aboard and postpone the adventure of the
enchanted cavern until next day. The yacht came to an anchor with the
purpose of remaining off the island all night, but the hardness of the
ground, and the weather becoming squally, obliged us to return to our
safer mooring at Y-Columb-Kill.
[Illustration: FINGAL’S CAVE.]
* * * * *
29th August, 1814.
Night squally and rainy--morning ditto--we weigh, however, and return
towards Staffa, and, very happily, the day clears as we approach the
isle. As we ascertained the situation of the cave, I shall only make
this memorandum, that when the weather will serve, the best landing
is to the lee of Booshala, a little conical islet or rock, composed
of basaltic columns placed in an oblique or sloping position. In this
way, you land at once on the flat causeway, formed by the heads of
truncated pillars, which leads to the cave. But if the state of tide
renders it impossible to land under Booshala, then take one of the
adjacent creeks; in which case, keeping to the left hand along the top
of the ledge of rocks which girdles in the isle, you find a dangerous
and precipitous descent to the causeway aforesaid, from the table.
Here we were under the necessity of towing our Commodore, Hamilton,
whose gallant heart never fails him, whatever the tenderness of his
toes may do. He was successfully lowered by a rope down the precipice,
and proceeding along the flat terrace or causeway already mentioned,
we reached the celebrated cave. I am not sure whether I was not more
affected by this second, than by the first view of it. The stupendous
columnar side walls--the depth and strength of the ocean with which
the cavern is filled--the variety of tints formed by stalactites
dropping and petrifying between the pillars, and resembling a sort of
chasing of yellow or cream-coloured marble filling the interstices of
the roof--the corresponding variety below, where the ocean rolls over
a red, and in some places a violet-coloured rock, the basis of the
basaltic pillars--the dreadful noise of those august billows so well
corresponding with the grandeur of the scene--are all circumstances
elsewhere unparalleled. We have now seen in our voyage the three
grandest caverns in Scotland,--Smowe, Macallister’s Cave, and Staffa;
so that, like the Troglodytes of yore, we may be supposed to know
something of the matter. It is, however, impossible to compare scenes
of natures so different, nor, were I compelled to assign a preference
to any of the three, could I do it but with reference to their distinct
characters, which might affect different individuals in different
degrees. The characteristic of the Smowe cave may in this case be
called the terrific, for the difficulties which oppose the stranger are
of a nature so uncommonly wild, as, for the first time at least, to
convey an impression of terror--with which the scenes to which he is
introduced fully correspond. On the other hand the dazzling whiteness
of the incrustations in Macallister’s Cave, the elegance of the
entablature, the beauty of its limpid pool, and the graceful dignity
of its arch, render its leading features those of severe and chastened
beauty. Staffa, the third of these subterranean wonders, may challenge
sublimity as its principal characteristic. Without the savage gloom
of the Smowe cave, and investigated with more apparent ease, though,
perhaps, with equal real danger, the stately regularity of its columns
forms a contrast to the grotesque imagery of Macallister’s Cave,
combining at once the sentiments of grandeur and beauty. The former is,
however, predominant, as it must necessarily be in any scene of the
kind.
We had scarce left Staffa when the wind and rain returned.
_Lockhart, Life of Sir Walter Scott_ (Edinburgh, 1878).
FOOTNOTES:
[2]
“----that wondrous dome,
Where, as to shame the temples deck’d
By skill of earthly architect,
Nature herself, it seem’d, would raise,
A minster to her Maker’s praise!
Not for a meaner use ascend
Her columns, or her arches bend;
Nor of a theme less solemn tells
That mighty surge that ebbs and swells,
And still, beneath each awful pause
From the high vault an answer draws,
In varied tone prolonged and high
That mocks the organ’s melody.
Nor doth its entrance front in vain
To old Iona’s holy fane,
That Nature’s voice might seem to say,
‘Well hast thou done, frail Child of clay!
Thy humble powers that stately shrine
Task’d high and hard--but witness mine!’”
_Lord of the Isles._ Canto IV. St. 10.
[3] _Ode on the Superstitions of the Highlands._
FINGAL’S CAVE
(_SCOTLAND_)
JOHN KEATS
I am puzzled how to give you an Idea of Staffa. It can only be
represented by a first-rate drawing. One may compare the surface of the
Island to a roof--this roof is supported by grand pillars of basalt
standing together as thick as honeycombs. The finest thing is Fingal’s
Cave--it is entirely a hollowing out of Basalt Pillars. Suppose now
the Giants who rebelled against Jove had taken a whole Mass of black
Columns and bound them together like bunches of matches--and then
with immense axes had made a cavern in the body of these columns----
Of course the roof and floor must be composed of broken ends of the
Columns--such is Fingal’s Cave, except that the Sea has done the work
of excavations, and is continually dashing there--so that we walk
along the sides of the cave on the pillars which are left as if for
convenient stairs. The roof is arched somewhat gothic-wise, and the
length of some of the entire side-pillars is fifty feet. About the
island you might seat an army of Men each on a pillar. The length of
the cave is 120 feet, and from its extremity the view into the sea,
through the large Arch at the entrance--the colour of the columns is a
sort of black with a lurking gloom of purple therein. For solemnity and
grandeur it far surpasses the finest Cathedral. At the extremity of
the Cave there is a small perforation into another cave, at which the
waters meeting and buffeting each other there is sometimes produced a
report as of a cannon heard as far as Iona, which must be twelve Miles.
As we approached in the boat, there was such a fine swell of the sea
that the pillars appeared rising immediately out of the crystal. But it
is impossible to describe it--
Not Aladdin magian
Ever such a work began.
Not the Wizard of the Dee
Ever such a dream could see,
Not St. John in Patmos Isle
In the passion of his toil
When he saw the churches seven
Golden-aisled built up in heaven
Gaz’d at such a rugged wonder.
As I stood its roofing under
Lo! I saw one sleeping there
On the marble cold and bare.
While the surges wash’d his feet
And his garments white did beat
Drench’d about the sombre rocks,
On his neck his well-grown locks
Lifted dry above the Main
Were upon the curl again--
“What is this? and what art thou?”
Whisper’d I, and touch’d his brow;
“What art thou? and what is this?”
Whisper’d I, and strove to kiss
The Spirit’s hand, to wake his eyes;
Up he started in a trice:
“I am Lycidas,” said he
“Fam’d in funeral Minstrelsy--
This was architected thus
By the great Oceanus.
Here his mighty waters play
Hollow Organs all the day,
Here, by turns, his dolphins all,
Finny palmers great and small,
Come to pay devotion due--
Each a mouth of pearls must strew!
Many a mortal of these days
Dares to pass our sacred ways,
Dares to touch, audaciously
This Cathedral of the sea--
I have been the Pontiff-priest,
Where the Waters never rest,
Where a fledgy sea-bird choir
Soars for ever--holy fire
I have hid from Mortal Man.
Proteus is my Sacristan
But the stupid eye of Mortal
Hath pass’d beyond the Rocky portal,
So for ever will I leave
Such a taint and soon unweave
All the magic of the place--
’Tis now free to stupid face--
To cutters and to fashion boats,
To cravats and Petticoats.
The great Sea shall war it down,
For its fame shall not be blown
At every farthing quadrille dance.”
So saying with a Spirit’s glance
He dived--
I am sorry I am so indolent as to write such stuff as this. It can’t be
helped. The western coast of Scotland is a most strange place--it is
composed of rocks, mountains, mountainous and rocky islands intersected
by lochs--you can go but a short distance anywhere from salt water in
the highlands.
_Letters of John Keats_ (London and New York, 1891).
IN THE HIMALAYAS
(_INDIA_)
G. W. STEEVENS
In Calcutta they grumbled that the hot weather was beginning already.
Mornings were steamy, days sticky, and the municipal impurities rose
rankly. The carter squatted over his bullocks with his shining body
stark naked but for a loin-cloth.
At Siliguri, the bottom of the ascent to Darjiling, the rough grass and
the tea-gardens were sheeted at sunrise in a silver frost. What few
natives appeared happed their heads in shawls as if they had toothache.
It takes you an afternoon and a night to get as far as Siliguri. What
you principally notice on the way is the dullness of the flat, moist
richness of Bengal, and the extraordinary fullness of the first-class
carriages. Even at this winter season the residents of Calcutta snatch
at the chance of being cold for twenty-four hours. When you get out
of your carriage at the junction station, you see on the other side
of the platform a dumpy little toy train--a train at the wrong end of
a telescope with its wheels cut from beneath it. Engines and trucks
and carriages seem to be crawling like snakes on their bellies. Six
miniature easy-chairs, three facing three, on an open truck with an
awning, make a first-class carriage.
This is the Darjiling-Himalaya Railway--two-foot gauge, climbing four
feet to the hundred for fifty miles up the foothills of the greatest
mountains in the world. It is extraordinary as the only line in India
that has been built with Indian capital. But you will find that the
least of its wonders. A flat-faced hillman bangs with a hammer twice
three times on a spare bit of railway metal hung up by way of a gong,
the whistle screams, and you pant away on surely the most entrancing
railway journey in the world. Nothing very much to make your heart jump
in the first seven miles. You bowl along the surface of a slightly
ascending cart-load, and your view is mostly bamboo and tea. Graceful
enough, and cool to the eye--the bamboos, hedges or clumps of slender
stem with plumes of pale leaf swinging and nodding above them; the tea,
trim ranks and files of short, well-furnished bushes with lustrous,
dark-green leaves, not unlike evergreens or myrtle in a nursery at
home,--but you soon feel that you have known bamboo and tea all your
life. Then suddenly you begin to climb, and all at once you are in a
new world--a world of plants.
[Illustration: THE HIMALAYAS.]
A new world is easy to say, but this is new indeed and a very
world--such a primeval vegetable world as you have read of in books and
eked out with dreams. It has everything you know in your world, only
everything expressed in vegetation. It is a world in its variety alone.
Trees of every kind rise up round you at every angle--unfamiliar, most
of them, and exaggerations of forms you know, as if they were seen
through a microscope. You might come on such broad fleshy leaves by way
of Jack’s giant bean-stalk. Other growths take the form of bushes
as high as our trees; but beside them are skinny, stunted starvelings,
such as the most niggardly country might show. Then there are
grasses--tufted, ruddy bamboo grass, and huge yellow straws with giant
bents leaning insolently over to flick your face as you go by. Smaller
still grow the ferns, lurking shyly in the crevices of the banks. And
over everything, most luxuriant of everything, crawl hundred-armed
creepers, knitting and knotting the whole jungle into one mellay of
struggling life.
The varieties--the trees and shrubs and grasses and ferns and
creepers--you would see in any tropical garden; but you could not
see them at home. You could not see them in their unpruned native
intercourse one with the other. The rise and fall of the ground, the
whims of light and air, coax them into shapes that answer to the most
fantastic imagination. Now you are going through the solemn aisles of
a great cathedral--grey trunks for columns, with arches and vaulted
roofs of green, with dark, retreating chapels and altar-trappings of
mingled flowers. Now it is a king’s banqueting-hall, tapestried with
white-flowering creeper and crimson and purple bougainvillea; overhead
the scarlet-mahogany blossoms of a sparse-leaved tulip-tree might be
butterflies frescoed on a ceiling.
Fancy can compel the wilderness into moments of order, but wild it
remains. The growths are not generally buildings, but animate beings
in a real world. You see no perfectly shaped tree, as in a park or
garden; one is warped, another stunted, another bare below--each
formed, like men, by the pressure of a thousand fellows. Here is a
corpse spreading white, stark arms abroad. Here are half-a-dozen young
creatures rolling over each other like puppies at play. And there is
a creeper flinging tumultuous, enraptured arms round a stately tree;
presently it is gripping it in thick bands like Laocöon’s serpent,
then choking it mercilessly to death, then dead itself, its bleached,
bare streamers dangling limply in the wind. It is life, indeed, this
forest--plants fighting, victorious and vanquished; loving and getting
children; springing and waxing and decaying and dying--our own world of
men translated into plants.
While I am spinning similitudes, the Darjiling-Himalaya Railway is
panting always upwards, boring through the thick world of trees like
a mole. Now it sways round a curve so short that you can almost look
back into the next carriage, and you understand why the wheels are so
low. Now it stops dead, and almost before it stops starts backwards up
a zigzag, then forwards up another, and on again. In a moment it is
skating on the brink of a slide of shale that trembles to come down and
overwhelm it; next it is rumbling across a bridge above the point it
passed ten minutes ago, and also that which it will reach ten minutes
hence. Twisting, backing, circling, dodging, but always rising, it
untreads the skein whose end is in the clouds and the snows.
Presently the little engine draws quite clear of the jungle. You skirt
opener slopes, and the blue plain below is no longer a fleeting vista,
but a broad prospect. You see how the forest spills itself on to the
fields and spreads into a dark puddle over their lightness. You see
a great river overlaying the dimness with a ribbon of steel. The
ferns grow thicker about you; gigantic fronds bow at you from gullies
overhead, and you see the tree-fern--a great crown of drooping green on
a trunk of a man’s height--standing superbly alone, knowing its supreme
gracefulness. Next, as you rise and rise, the air gets sharp; through a
gauzy veil of mist appear again huge forests, but dark and gloomy with
brown moss dripping dankly from every branch. Rising, rising, and you
have now come to Ghoom, the highest point. Amid the cold fog appears
the witch of Ghoom--a hundred years old, with a pointed chin and mop of
grizzled hair all witch-fashion, but beaming genially and requesting
backsheesh.
Then round a corner--and here is Darjiling. A scattered settlement on
a lofty ridge, facing a great cup enclosed by other ridges--mountains
elsewhere, here hills. Long spurs run down into the hollow, half black
with forest, half pale and veined with many paths. At the bottom is a
little chequer of fresh green millet; the rim at the top seems to line
the sky.
And the Himalayas and the eternal snows? The devil a Himalaya in
sight. Thick vapours dip down and over the very rim of the cup; beyond
Darjiling is a tumult of peaked creamy cloud. You need not be told
it,--clouds that hide mountains always ape their shapes,--the majestic
Himalayas are behind that screen, and you will not see them to-day, nor
perhaps to-morrow, nor yet for a fortnight of to-morrows.
You must console yourself with Darjiling and the hillmen. And
Darjiling is pleasant to the eye as you look down on it, a huddle of
grey corrugated-iron roofs, one stepping over the other, hugging the
hillside with one or two red ones to break the monotone. There is no
continuous line of them: each stands by itself in a ring of deep green
first. The place is cool and grateful after an Indian town--clean and
roomy, a place of homes and not of pens.
In the middle of it is the bazaar, and my day, by luck, was market-day.
Here, again, you could never fancy yourself in India. A few Hindus
there are, but beside the dumpy hillmen their thin limbs, tiny
features, and melting eyes seem hardly human. More like the men you
know is the Tibetan, with a long profile and long, sharp nose, though
his hat has the turned-up brim of the Chinese, though he wears a
long bottle-green dressing-gown open to the girdle, and his pigtail
knocks at the back of his knees. But the prevailing type, though as
Mongolian, is far more genial than the Tibetan. Squat little men, for
the most part, fill the bazaar, with broad faces that give room for the
features, with button noses, and slits for eyes. They wear boots and
putties, or gaiters made of many-coloured carpet-bagging; and their
women are like them--with shawls over their heads, and broad sashes
swathing them from bosom to below the waist, with babies slung behind
their backs, not astride on the hip as are the spawn of India. Their
eyes are black as sloes--puckered, too, but seeming puckered with
laughter; and their clear yellow skins are actually rosy on the cheeks,
like a ripe apricot. Square-faced, long-pigtailed, plump, cheery, open
of gaze, and easy of carriage, rolling cigarettes, and offering them
to soothe babies--they might not be beautiful in Europe; here they are
ravishing.
But you come to Darjiling to see the snows. So on a night of agonizing
cold--feet and hands a block of ice the moment you cease to move
them--must follow a rise before it is light. Maybe the clouds will be
kinder this morning. No; the same stingy, clammy mist,--only there,
breaking through it, high up in the sky--yes, there are a few faint
streaks of white. Just a few marks of snow scored on the softer white
of the cloud, chill with the utterly disconsolate cold of ice through a
window of fog. Still, there are certainly Himalayas there.
Up and up I toiled; the sun was plainly rising behind the ridge of
Darjiling. In the cup below the sunlight was drawing down the hillsides
and peeling off the twilight. Then, at a sudden turn of the winding
ascent, I saw the summit of Kinchinjunga. Just the summit, poised in
the blue, shining and rejoicing in the sunrise. And as I climbed and
climbed, other peaks rose into sight below and beside him, all dazzling
white, mounting and mounting the higher I mounted, every instant more
huge and towering and stately, boring into the sky.
Up--till I came to the summit, and the sun appeared--a golden ball
swimming in a sea of silver. He was sending the clouds away curling
before him; they drifted across the mountains, but he pursued and smote
and dissolved them. And ever the mountains rose and rose, huger and
huger; as they swelled up they heaved the clouds away in rolls off
their shoulders. Now their waists were free, and all but their feet.
Only a chasm of fog still hid their lower slopes. Fifty miles away,
they looked as if I could toss a stone across to them; only you could
never hope to hit their heads, they towered so gigantically. Now the
clouds, clearing to right and left, laid bare a battlemented range
of snow-white wall barring the whole horizon. Behind these appeared
other peaks; it was not a range, but a country of mountains, not now a
wall, but a four-square castle carved by giants out of eternal ice. It
was the end of the world--a sheer rampart, which forbade the fancy of
anything beyond.
And in the centre, by peak and col and precipice, the prodigy reared
itself up to Kinchinjunga. Bare rock below, then blinding snow seamed
with ridges of chimneys, and then, above, the mighty summit--a
tremendous three-cornered slab of grey granite between two resplendent
faces of snow. Other mountains tiptoe at the sky snatch at it with a
peak like a needle. Kinchinjunga heaves himself up into it, broadly,
massively, and makes his summit a diadem. He towers without effort,
knowing his majesty. Sublime and inviolable, he lifts his grey
nakedness and his mail of burnished snow, and turns his forehead
serenely to sun and storm. Only their touch, of all things created, has
perturbed his solitude since the birth of time.
_In India_ (New York, 1899).
NIAGARA FALLS
(_NORTH AMERICA_)
ANTHONY TROLLOPE