brilliant birth of day; and then, suddenly, just when the sun rolled
into sight--an orb of gleaming gold, flooding the world beneath with
almost insufferable radiance--a vast mass of dense white clouds swept
before the north wind over the view, completely blotting out the sun,
the belt of rose and gold, the lighted mountains and plains, and the
lower regions of Fuji-San. It was day again, but misty, white, and
doubtful; and when we started to climb the last two stages of the cone
the flags of the stations were invisible, and we could not know whether
we should find the summit clear, or wrapped in enveloping clouds.
All was to be fortunate, however, on this happy day; and after a
hard clambering of the remaining 2,000 feet we planted our staffs
victoriously on the level ground of the crater’s lip and gazed north,
south, east, and west through clear and cloudless atmosphere over a
prodigious prospect, whose diameter could not be less than 300 miles.
It was one of the few days when O-ana-mochi, the Lord of the Great
Hole, was wholly propitious! Behind the long row of little black
huts standing on the edge of the mountain, gaped that awful, deadly
Cup of the Volcano--an immense pit half a mile wide and six or seven
hundred feet deep, its sides black, yellow, red, white, and grey,
with the varying hues of the lava and scoriæ. In one spot where a
perpetual shadow lay, from the ridge-peaks of Ken-ga-mine and the
Shaka-no-wari-ishi, or “Cleft Rock of Buddha,” gleamed a large patch
of unmelted snow, and there was dust-covered snow at the bottom of
the crater. We skirted part of the crater, passed by the dangerous
path which is styled “Oya-shirazu, Ko-shirazu,” “The place where you
must forget parents and children, to take care of yourself;” saw
the issue of the Kim-mei-sai or “Golden famous water,” and of the
Gim-mei-sai, or “Silver famous water”; and came back to breakfast at
our hut silent with the delight and glory, the beauty and terror of
the scene. Enormous flocks of fleecy clouds and cloudlets wandered in
the lower air, many thousand feet beneath, but nowhere concealed the
lakes, peaks, rivers, towns, villages, valleys, sea-coasts, islands,
and distant provinces spreading out all round. Imagine the prospect
obtainable at 13,000 feet of elevation through the silvery air of Japan
on a summer’s morning with not a cloud, except shifting, thin, and
transitory ones, to veil the view!...
At the temple with the bell we were duly stamped--shirts, sticks, and
clothing--with the sacred mark of the mountain, and having made the
hearts of our faithful and patient _ninsoku_ glad with extra pay,
turned our backs on the great extinct volcano, whose crest, glowing
again in the morning sunlight, had no longer any secrets for Captain
Ingles, or Takaji San, or myself.
_Seas and Lands_ (New York, 1891).
THE CEDARS OF LEBANON
(_SYRIA_)
ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE
The Sheik of Eden, the last inhabited village towards the summit of
Lebanon, was the maternal uncle of M. Mazoyer, my interpreter. Informed
by his nephew of our arrival in Tripoli, the venerable sheik descended
the mountain with his eldest son and a portion of his retinue; he
came to visit me at the convent of the Franciscans, and offered me
hospitality at his home in Eden. From Eden to the Cedars of Solomon it
is only a three hours’ march; and if the snows that cover the mountains
will permit us, we can visit these ancient trees that have spread their
glory over all Lebanon and that are contemporaries of the great king;
we accepted, and the start was arranged for the following day.
At five o’clock in the morning we were on horseback. The caravan, more
numerous than usual, was preceded by the Sheik of Eden, an admirable
old man whose elegance of manner, noble and easy politeness, and
magnificent costume were far from suggesting an Arab chieftain; one
would have called him a patriarch marching at the head of his tribe; he
rode upon a mare of the desert whose golden-bay skin and floating mane
would have made a worthy mount for a hero of Jerusalem; his son and his
principal attendants caracoled upon magnificent stallions, a few paces
before him; we came next, and then the long file of our _moukres_ and
our Saïs....
The sheik has sent three Arabs over the route to the Cedars to learn if
the snow will permit us to approach those trees; the Arabs returning
say that access is impracticable; there are fourteen feet of snow in a
narrow valley which must be crossed before reaching the trees;--wishing
to get as near as possible, I entreat the sheik to give me his son
and several horsemen; I leave my wife and my caravan at Eden; I mount
the strongest of my horses, _Scham_, and we are _en route_ at break
of day;--a march of three hours over the crests of the mountains, or
in the fields softened with melting snow. I arrive at the edge of
the valley of the Saints, a deep gorge where the glance sweeps from
the rocky height to a valley more confined, more sombre and more
solemn even than that of Hamana; at the top of this valley, at the
place where, after continually rising, it reaches the snows, a superb
sheet of water falls, a hundred feet high and two or three _toises_
wide; the entire valley resounds with this waterfall and the leaping
torrents that it feeds; on every side the rocky flanks of the mountain
stream with foam; we see almost beyond our vision, in the depths of
the valley, two large villages the houses of which can scarcely be
distinguished from the rocks rolled down by the torrent; the tops of
the poplars and the mulberries from here look like tufts of reed or
grass; we descend to the village of Beschieraï by paths cut in the
rock, and so abrupt that one can hardly imagine that men will risk
themselves upon them; people do perish sometimes; a stone thrown from
the crest where we stand would fall upon the roofs of these villages
where we shall arrive after an hour’s descent; above the cascade and
the snows, enormous fields of ice extend, undulating like vapours
in tints greenish and blue by turns; in about a quarter of an hour
towards the left in a half circular valley formed by the last mounts of
Lebanon, we see a large, black blot upon the snow,--the famous group
of cedars; they crown the brow of the mountain like a diadem; they
mark the branching off of numerous and large valleys that descend from
there; the sea and the sky are their horizon.
We put our horses to a gallop over the snow to get as near as possible
to the forest; but on arriving five or six hundred steps from the
trees, we plunge our horses up to their shoulders; we realize that
the report of the Arabs is correct, and we must renounce the hope of
touching these relics of the centuries and of nature; we alight and sit
upon a rock to contemplate them.
[Illustration: THE CEDARS OF LEBANON.]
These trees are the most celebrated natural monuments in the whole
universe. Religion, poetry, and history have equally consecrated
them. Holy Writ celebrates them in several places. They are one of
the favourite images which the prophets employ. Solomon wished to
consecrate them--doubtless on account of the renown of magnificence and
sanctity that these prodigies of vegetation enjoyed at this epoch--to
the ornamentation of the temple that he was the first to elevate to
the one God. These were certainly the trees; for Ezekiel speaks of
the cedars of Eden as the most beautiful of Lebanon. The Arabs of
all sects have a traditional veneration for them. They attribute to
these trees, not only a vegetative force that gives them eternal life,
but even a soul that makes them give signs of wisdom, of foresight,
similar to those of instinct in animals and intelligence in men. They
know the seasons in advance; they move their enormous branches like
human limbs, they spread or contract their boughs, they raise their
branches towards the sky or incline them to the earth, according as
the snow is preparing to fall or to melt. They are divine beings
under the form of trees. They grow on this single spot of the mounts
of Lebanon; they take root far beyond the region where all prolific
vegetation dies. All this strikes the imagination of the Oriental
people with astonishment, and I do not know that science is not even
more astonished. Alas! however, Basan languishes and Carmel and the
flower of Lebanon fade.--These trees diminish every century. Travellers
formerly counted thirty or forty, later seventeen, and still later,
about a dozen.--There are now only seven of those whose massive forms
can presume to be contemporaneous with Biblical times. Around these old
memorials of past ages, which know the history of the ground better
than history herself, and which could tell us, if they could speak, of
many empires, religions, and vanished human races, there remains still
a little forest of cedars more yellow it appears to me than a group of
four or five hundred trees or shrubs. Each year in the month of June
the population of Beschieraï, Eden, and Kanobin, and all the villages
of the neighbouring valleys, ascend to the cedars and celebrate mass
at their feet. How many prayers have resounded beneath their branches!
And what more beautiful temple, what nearer altar than the sky! What
more majestic and holier daïs than the highest plateau of Lebanon, the
trunks of the cedars and the sacred boughs that have shaded and that
will still shade so many human generations pronouncing differently
the name of God, but who recognize him everywhere in his works and
adore him in his manifestations of nature! And I, I also prayed in the
presence of those trees. The harmonious wind that resounded through
their sonorous branches played in my hair and froze upon my eyelids
those tears of sorrow and adoration.
_Voyage en Orient_ (Paris, 1843).
THE GIANT’S CAUSEWAY
(_IRELAND_)
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
The road to the Causeway is bleak, wild, and hilly.
The cabins along the road are scarcely better than those of Kerry, the
inmates as ragged, and more fierce and dark-looking. I never was so
pestered by juvenile beggars as in the dismal village of Ballintoy.
A crowd of them rushed after the car, calling for money in a fierce
manner, as if it was their right; dogs as fierce as the children came
yelling after the vehicle; and the faces which scowled out of the black
cabins were not a whit more good-humoured. We passed by one or two more
clumps of cabins, with their turf and corn-stacks lying together at the
foot of the hills; placed there for the convenience of the children,
doubtless, who can thus accompany the car either way, and shriek out
their “Bonny gantleman, gi’e us a ha’p’ny.” A couple of churches,
one with a pair of its pinnacles blown off, stood in the dismal open
country, and a gentleman’s house here and there: there were no trees
about them, but a brown grass round about--hills rising and falling in
front, and the sea beyond. The occasional view of the coast was noble;
wild Bengore towering eastwards as we went along; Raghery Island before
us, in the steep rocks and caves of which Bruce took shelter when
driven from yonder Scottish coast, that one sees stretching blue in the
northeast.
I think this wild gloomy tract through which one passes is a good
prelude for what is to be the great sight of the day, and got my mind
to a proper state of awe by the time we were near the journey’s end.
Turning away shorewards by the fine house of Sir Francis Macnaghten, I
went towards a lone handsome inn, that stands close to the Causeway.
The landlord at Ballycastle had lent me Hamilton’s book to read on the
road; but I had not time then to read more than half-a-dozen pages of
it. They described how the author, a clergyman distinguished as a man
of science, had been thrust out of a friend’s house by the frightened
servants one wild night, and butchered by some Whiteboys who were
waiting outside and called for his blood. I had been told at Belfast
that there was a corpse in the inn: was it there now? It had driven
off, the car-boy said, “in a handsome hearse and four to Dublin the
whole way.” It was gone, but I thought the house looked as if the ghost
was there. See, yonder are the black rocks stretching to Portrush: how
leaden and grey the sea looks! how grey and leaden the sky! You hear
the waters rushing evermore, as they have done since the beginning
of the world. The car drives us with a dismal grinding noise of the
wheels to the big lone house: there’s no smoke in the chimneys; the
doors are locked. Three savage-looking men rush after the car: are they
the men who took out Mr. Hamilton--took him out and butchered him in
the moonlight? Is everybody, I wonder, dead in that big house? Will
they let us in before those men are up? Out comes a pretty smiling
girl, with a curtsey, just as the savages are at the car, and you
are ushered into a very comfortable room; and the men turn out to be
guides. Well, thank Heaven it’s no worse! I had fifteen pounds still
left; and, when desperate, have no doubt should fight like a lion.
[Illustration: THE GIANT’S LOOM, GIANT’S CAUSEWAY.]
The traveller no sooner issues from the inn by a back door, which he
is informed will lead him straight to the Causeway, than the guides
pounce upon him, with a dozen rough boatmen who are likewise lying in
wait; and a crew of shrill beggar-boys, with boxes of spars, ready to
tear him and each other to pieces seemingly, yell and bawl incessantly
round him. “I’m the guide Miss Henry recommends,” shouts one. “I’m
Mr. Macdonald’s guide,” pushes in another. “This way,” roars a third,
and drags his prey down a precipice; the rest of them clambering and
quarrelling after. I had no friends; I was perfectly helpless. I wanted
to walk down to the shore by myself, but they would not let me, and
I had nothing for it but to yield myself into the hands of the guide
who had seized me, who hurried me down the steep to a little wild
bay, flanked on each side by rugged cliffs and rocks, against which
the waters came tumbling, frothing, and roaring furiously. Upon some
of these black rocks two or three boats were lying: four men seized
a boat, pushed it shouting into the water, and ravished me into it.
We had slid between two rocks, where the channel came gurgling in: we
were up one swelling wave that came in a huge advancing body ten feet
above us, and were plunging madly down another (the descent causes a
sensation in the lower regions of the stomach which it is not at all
necessary here to describe), before I had leisure to ask myself why
the deuce I was in that boat, with four rowers hurrooing and bounding
madly from one liquid mountain to another--four rowers whom I was bound
to pay. I say, the query came qualmishly across me why the devil I was
there, and why not walking calmly on the shore.
The guide began pouring his professional jargon into my ears. “Every
one of them bays,” says he, “has a name (take my place, and the spray
won’t come over you): that is Port Noffer, and the next, Port na Gange;
them rocks is the Stookawns (for every rock has its name as well as
every bay); and yonder--give way, my boys,--hurray, we’re over it now:
has it wet you much, sir?--that’s a little cave: it goes five hundred
feet under ground, and the boats goes into it easy of a calm day.”
“Is it a fine day or a rough one now?” said I; the internal disturbance
going on with more severity than ever.
“It’s betwixt and between; or, I may say, neither one nor the other.
Sit up, sir. Look at the entrance of the cave. Don’t be afraid, sir;
never has an accident happened in any one of these boats, and the
most delicate ladies has rode in them on rougher days than this. Now,
boys, pull to the big cave. That, sir, is six hundred and sixty yards
in length, though some say it goes for miles inland, where the people
sleeping in their houses hear the waters roaring under them.”
The water was tossing and tumbling into the mouth of the little cave. I
looked,--for the guide would not let me alone till I did,--and saw what
might be expected: a black hole of some forty feet high, into which
it was no more possible to see than into a millstone. “For Heaven’s
sake, sir,” says I, “if you’ve no particular wish to see the mouth of
the big cave, put about and let us see the Causeway and get ashore.”
This was done, the guide meanwhile telling some story of a ship of
the Spanish Armada having fired her guns at two peaks of rock, then
visible, which the crew mistook for chimney-pots--what benighted fools
these Spanish Armadilloes must have been; it is easier to see a rock
than a chimney-pot; it is easy to know that chimney-pots do not grow on
rocks.--“But where, if you please, is the Causeway?”
“That’s the Causeway before you,” says the guide.
“Which?”
“That pier which you see jutting out into the bay right ahead.”
“_Mon dieu!_ and have I travelled a hundred and fifty miles to see
_that_?”
I declare, upon my conscience, the barge moored at Hungerford Market
is a more majestic object, and seems to occupy as much space. As for
telling a man that the Causeway is merely a part of the sight; that he
is there for the purpose of examining the surrounding scenery; that if
he looks to the westward he will see Portrush and Donegal Head before
him; that the cliffs immediately in his front are green in some places,
black in others, interspersed with blotches of brown and streaks of
verdure;--what is all this to a lonely individual lying sick in a boat,
between two immense waves that only give him momentary glimpses of the
land in question, to show that it is frightfully near, and yet you are
an hour from it? They won’t let you go away--that cursed guide _will_
tell out his stock of legends and stories. The boatmen insist upon your
looking at boxes of “specimens,” which you must buy of them; they laugh
as you grow paler and paler; they offer you more and more “specimens”;
even the dirty lad who pulls number three, and is not allowed by his
comrades to speak, puts in _his_ oar, and hands you over a piece of
Irish diamond (it looks like half-sucked alicompayne), and scorns you.
“Hurry, lads, now for it, give way!” how the oars do hurtle in the
rowlocks, as the boat goes up an aqueous mountain, and then down into
one of those cursed maritime valleys where there is no rest as on shore!
At last, after they had pulled me enough about, and sold me all the
boxes of specimens, I was permitted to land at the spot whence we set
out, and whence, though we had been rowing for an hour, we had never
been above five hundred yards distant. Let all cockneys take warning
from this; let the solitary one caught issuing from the back door
of the hotel, shout at once to the boatmen to be gone--that he will
have none of them. Let him, at any rate, go first down to the water
to determine whether it be smooth enough to allow him to take any
decent pleasure by riding on its surface. For after all, it must be
remembered that it is pleasure we come for--that we are not _obliged_
to take those boats.--Well, well! I paid ten shillings for mine, and
ten minutes after would cheerfully have paid five pounds to be allowed
to quit it; it was no hard bargain after all. As for the boxes of
spar and specimens, I at once, being on terra firma, broke my promise,
and said I would see them all--first. It is wrong to swear, I know; but
sometimes it relieves one _so_ much!
[Illustration: THE KEYSTONE, GIANT’S CAUSEWAY.]
The first act on shore was to make a sacrifice to Sanctissima Tellus;
offering up to her a neat and becoming Taglioni coat, bought for a
guinea in Covent Garden only three months back. I sprawled on my back
on the smoothest of rocks that is, and tore the elbows to pieces: the
guide picked me up; the boatman did not stir, for they had their will
of me; the guide alone picked me up, I say, and bade me follow him.
We went across a boggy ground in one of the little bays, round which
rise the green walls of the cliff, terminated on either side by a black
crag, and the line of the shore washed by the poluphloisboiotic, nay
the poluphloisboiotatotic sea. Two beggars stepped over the bog after
us howling for money, and each holding up a cursed box of specimens.
No oaths, threats, entreaties, would drive these vermin away; for some
time the whole scene had been spoiled by the incessant and abominable
jargon of them, the boatmen, and the guides. I was obliged to give them
money to be left in quiet, and if, as no doubt will be the case, the
Giant’s Causeway shall be a still greater resort of travellers than
ever, the county must put policemen on the rocks to keep the beggars
away, or fling them in the water when they appear.
And now, by force of money, having got rid of the sea and land beggars,
you are at liberty to examine at your leisure the wonders of the place.
There is not the least need for a guide to attend the stranger, unless
the latter have a mind to listen to a parcel of legends, which may be
well from the mouth of a wild simple peasant who believes in his tales,
but are odious from a dullard who narrates them at the rate of sixpence
a lie. Fee him and the other beggars, and at last you are left tranquil
to look at the strange scene with your own eyes, and enjoy your own
thoughts at leisure.
That is, if the thoughts awakened by such a scene may be called
enjoyment; but for me, I confess, they are too near akin to fear to be
pleasant; and I don’t know that I would desire to change that sensation
of awe and terror which the hour’s walk occasioned, for a greater
familiarity with this wild, sad, lonely place. The solitude is awful.
I can’t understand how those chattering guides dare to lift up their
voices here, and cry for money.
It looks like the beginning of the world, somehow: the sea looks
older than in other places, the hills and rocks strange, and formed
differently from other rocks and hills--as those vast dubious monsters
were formed who possessed the earth before man. The hilltops are
shattered into a thousand cragged fantastical shapes; the water comes
swelling into scores of little strange creeks, or goes off with a
leap, roaring into those mysterious caves yonder, which penetrate who
knows how far into our common world. The savage rock-sides are painted
of a hundred colours. Does the sun ever shine here? When the world
was moulded and fashioned out of formless chaos, this must have been
the _bit over_--a remnant of chaos! Think of that!--it is a tailor’s
simile. Well, I am a cockney: I wish I were in Pall Mall! Yonder is a
kelp-burner: a lurid smoke from his burning kelp rises up to the leaden
sky, and he looks as naked and fierce as Cain. Bubbling up out of the
rocks at the very brim of the sea rises a little crystal spring: how
comes it there? and there is an old grey hag beside, who has been there
for hundreds and hundreds of years, and there sits and sells whisky
at the extremity of creation! How do you dare to sell whisky there,
old woman? Did you serve old Saturn with a glass when he lay along the
Causeway here? In reply, she says, she has no change for a shilling:
she never has; but her whisky is good.
This is not a description of the Giant’s Causeway (as some clever
critic will remark), but of a Londoner there, who is by no means so
interesting an object as the natural curiosity in question. That single
hint is sufficient; I have not a word more to say. “If,” says he, “you
cannot describe the scene lying before us--if you cannot state from
your personal observation that the number of basaltic pillars composing
the Causeway has been computed at about forty thousand, which vary
in diameter, their surface presenting the appearance of a tesselated
pavement of polygonal stones--that each pillar is formed of several
distinct joints, the convex end of the one being accurately fitted in
the concave of the next, and the length of the joints varying from five
feet to four inches--that although the pillars are polygonal, there is
but one of three sides in the whole forty thousand (think of that!),
but three of nine sides, and that it may be safely computed that
ninety-nine out of one hundred pillars have either five, six, or seven
sides; if you cannot state something useful, you had much better, sir,
retire and get your dinner.”