glowing colours of double or treble rainbows. The evening sun, from a
hot yellow sky imparts a sulphureous hue, and gives one the impression
that the yawning gulf might resemble the mouth of the bottomless pit.
No bird sings and sings on the branches of the grove of perpetual
showers, or ever builds his nest there. We saw hornbills and flocks of
little black weavers flying across from the mainland to the islands,
and from the islands to the points of the promontories and back again,
but they uniformly shunned the region of perpetual rain, occupied
by the evergreen grove. The sunshine, elsewhere in this land so
overpowering, never penetrates the deep gloom of that shade. In the
presence of the strange Mosi-oa-tunya, we can sympathize with those
who, when the world was young, peopled earth, air, and river, with
beings not of mortal form. Sacred to what deity would be this awful
chasm and that dark grove, over which hovers an ever-abiding “pillar of
cloud”?
The ancient Batoka chieftains used Kazeruka, now Garden Island, and
Boaruka, the island further west, also on the lip of the Falls, as
sacred spots for worshipping the Deity. It is no wonder that under the
cloudy columns, and near the brilliant rainbows, with the ceaseless
roar of the cataract, with the perpetual flow, as if pouring forth from
the hand of the Almighty, their souls should be filled with reverential
awe.
_The Zambesi and its Tributaries 1858-1864_ (London, 1865).
THE DRAGON-TREE OF OROTAVA[7]
(_CANARY ISLANDS_)
ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT
Orotava, the ancient Taoro of the Guanches, is situated on a very steep
declivity. The streets seem deserted; the houses are solidly built,
and of gloomy appearance. We passed along a lofty aqueduct, lined with
a great number of fine ferns; and visited several gardens, in which
the fruit trees of the north of Europe are mingled with orange trees,
pomegranates, and date trees. We were assured, that these last were
as little productive here as on the coast of Cumana. Although we had
been made acquainted, from the narratives of many travellers, with the
dragon-tree in M. Franqui’s garden, we were not the less struck with
its enormous size. We were told, that the trunk of this tree, which is
mentioned in several very ancient documents as marking the boundaries
of a field, was as gigantic in the Fifteenth Century as it is in the
present time. Its height appeared to us to be about fifty or sixty
feet; its circumference near the roots is forty-five feet. We could not
measure higher, but Sir George Staunton found that, ten feet from the
ground, the diameter of the trunk is still twelve English feet; which
corresponds perfectly with the statement of Borda, who found its mean
circumference thirty-three feet, eight inches, French measure. The
trunk is divided into a great number of branches, which rise in the
form of a candelabrum, and are terminated by tufts of leaves, like the
yucca which adorns the valley of Mexico. This division gives it a very
different appearance from that of the palm-tree.
Among organic creations, this tree is undoubtedly, together with the
Adansonia or baobab of Senegal, one of the oldest inhabitants of our
globe. The baobabs are of still greater dimensions than the dragon-tree
of Orotava. There are some which near the root measure thirty-four feet
in diameter, though their total height is only from fifty to sixty
feet. But we should observe, that the Adansonia, like the ochroma,
and all the plants of the family of bombax, grow much more rapidly
than the dracæna, the vegetation of which is very slow. That in M.
Franqui’s garden still bears every year both flowers and fruit. Its
aspect forcibly exemplifies “that eternal youth of nature,” which is an
inexhaustible source of motion and of life.
The _dracæna_, which is seen only in cultivated spots in the Canary
Islands, at Madeira, and Porto Santo, presents a curious phenomenon
with respect to the emigration of plants. It has never been found
in a wild state on the continent of Africa. The East Indies is its
real country. How has this tree been transplanted to Teneriffe, where
it is by no means common? Does its existence prove, that, at some
very distant period, the Guanches had connexions with other nations
originally from Asia?[8]
[Illustration: THE DRAGON TREE.]
The age of trees is marked by their size, and the union of age with
the manifestation of constantly renewed vigour is a charm peculiar to
the vegetable kingdom. The gigantic Dragon-tree of Orotava (as sacred
in the eyes of the inhabitants of the Canaries as the olive-tree in
the Citadel of Athens, or the Elm of Ephesus), the diameter of which I
found, when I visited those islands, to be more than sixteen feet, had
the same colossal size when the French adventurers, the Béthencourts,
conquered these gardens of the Hesperides in the beginning of the
Fifteenth Century; yet it still flourishes, as if in perpetual
youth, bearing flowers and fruit. A tropical forest of Hymenæas and
Cæsalpinieæ may perhaps present to us a monument of more than a
thousand years’ standing.
This colossal dragon-tree, _Dracæna draco_, stands in one of the most
delightful spots in the world. In June, 1799, when we ascended the
Peak of Teneriffe, we measured the circumference of the tree and found
it nearly forty-eight English feet. Our measurement was taken several
feet above the root. Lower down, and nearer to the ground, Le Dru made
it nearly seventy-nine English feet. The height of the tree is not
much above sixty-nine English feet. According to tradition, this tree
was venerated by the Guanches (as was the ash-tree of Ephesus by the
Greeks, or as the Lydian plane-tree which Xerxes decked with ornaments,
and the sacred Banyan-tree of Ceylon), and at the time of the first
expedition of the Béthencourts in 1402, it was already as thick and
as hollow as it now is. Remembering that the Dracæna grows extremely
slowly, we are led to infer the high antiquity of the tree of Orotava.
Bertholet in his description of Teneriffe, says: “_En comparant les
jeunes Dragonniers, voisins de l’arbre gigantesque, les calcus qu’on
fait sur l’ âge de ce dernier effraient l’imagination._” (Nova Acta
Acad. Leop. Carol. Naturæ Curiosorum 1827, vol. xiii., p. 781.) The
dragon-tree has been cultivated in the Canaries, and in Madeira and
Porto Santo, from the earliest times; and an accurate observer, Leopold
von Buch, has even found it wild in Teneriffe, near Igueste....
The measurement of the dragon-tree of the Villa Franqui was made on
Borda’s first voyage with Pingré, in 1771; not in his second voyage,
in 1776, with Varela. It is affirmed that in the earlier times of
the Norman and Spanish conquests, in the Fifteenth Century, Mass
was said at a small altar erected in the hollow trunk of the tree.
Unfortunately, the dragon-tree of Orotava lost one side of its top in
the storm of the 21st of July, 1819.
_Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America
during the years 1799-1804_ (London, 1825); and _Aspects of Nature_
(Philadelphia, 1849).
FOOTNOTES:
[7] This famous tree was blown down by a storm in 1868. Its age was
estimated from five to six thousand years.--E. S.
[8] The form of the dragon-tree is exhibited in several species of the
genus Dracæna, at the Cape of Good Hope, in China, and in New Zealand.
But in New Zealand it is superseded by the form of the yucca; for the
_Dracæna borealis_ of Aiton is a Convallaria, of which it has all the
appearance. The astringent juice, known in commerce by the name of
dragon’s blood, is, according to the inquiries we made on the spot, the
produce of several American plants. At Laguna, toothpicks steeped in
the juice of the dragon-tree are made in the nunneries, and are much
extolled as highly useful for keeping the gums in a healthy state.
MOUNT SHASTA
(_UNITED STATES_)
J. W. BODDAM-WHETHAM
Mount Shasta is the most striking feature of Northern California. Its
height is about 14,500 feet above the sea--very nearly the height of
Mount Blanc. Mount Blanc is broken into a succession of peaks, but
Shasta is one stupendous peak, set upon a broad base that sweeps out
far and wide. From the base the volcanic cone rises up in one vast
stretch of snow and lava. It is very precipitous to the north and
south, but east and west there are two slopes right up to the crater.
It is a matter of doubt whether Shasta is dead or only sleeping.
Vesuvius slept calmly for centuries, and then spread death and
desolation for miles around. The base of the mountain is magnificently
watered and wooded, and forms a splendid hunting-ground. The woods are
full of deer and bears; and now and then a mountain-goat, an animal
very like the chamois of the Alps, is seen in the higher part of the
mountains.
Well-provided with blankets and provisions, we started with a guide,
and a man to look after the horses, at a very early hour, and rode
through a beautiful forest of pines, silver firs, and cedars. Along the
banks of the streams were aspens, willows, and the trees known by the
name of the “Balm of Gilead,” whose vivid green leaves were already
changing to a rich orange or an apple-red--forming a beautiful contrast
of colours with the glazed green of the cedars and the green-tinted
white of the silver firs.
After an easy ascent to a height of about 8,000 feet, we reached the
limits of vegetation. Thence our upward path lay over snow, ice, and
lava--lonely, isolated barrenness on every side, relieved only by an
occasional solitary dwarf-pine, struggling to retain life amidst fierce
storms and heavy-weighing snow. Many of them were quite dead, but
embalmed by frost and snow in a never-decaying death.
With a few loads of this fuel we soon made a splendid fire, the warmth
of which was most welcome in the cold rarefied atmosphere. Scarcely had
we finished a capital supper ere night descended, and great clouds and
fitful fogs began to drift past. These in their turn broke, and the
moon threw a weird light over the forest below; whilst above rose piles
upon piles of pinkish lava and snow-fields, reaching far up into the
sky, whose magnificent blue grew more sparkling and clear every moment.
Wrapping ourselves in our bundles of blankets, we crept as close as
possible to the huge fire, and before long my companions were fast
asleep and snoring. I could not sleep a wink, and mentally registered
a vow never again to camp out without a pillow. No one can tell till
he has tried it, the difference there is between going to sleep with a
pillow under the head and a stone or a pair of boots or saddle as its
resting-place.
[Illustration: MOUNT SHASTA.]
The deep silence, unbroken save by a most unromantic snore, was
painfully oppressive, and I longed to hear even a growl from a bear or
a deep whine from a California lion.[9] I listened intently, for it
seemed as if the slightest sound, even a hundred miles away, ought to
be heard, so still and frosty was the air.
But none fell on my ear, not even a murmur to soothe one to sleep,
and I began to think bears and lions were snores and delusions, when,
just as I was dozing off, I felt my arm violently pulled, and a voice
called out that it was time for us to make a start. Hot coffee soon
had a cheering effect, and long before daylight we left our warm
camping-ground, and began the higher ascent on foot. Broken stone and
slabs of lava afforded pretty good foothold, far preferable to the
fields of frozen snow, which we carefully avoided. After a couple of
hours’ hard walking we seemed to be just as far from the summit as
when we started; but the views gradually became grander. From a rocky
promontory we looked back over a sea of glittering clouds, the only
land visible being the peaks of the Coast range, near the Pacific;
all else was cloud, to which the moonlight lent an almost dazzling
whiteness:
“Far clouds of feathery gold,
Shaded with deepest purple, gleam
Like islands on a dark blue sea.”
When the sun rose and the mists cleared off, the scene was
indescribably grand, and the gradual unfolding of the vast panorama
unapproachable in its splendour.
After some hours of weary climbing over crumbling scoria and splintered
rock, we reached the crater. In the ascent to the summit overlooking
the crater, we had to cross an ice-field. It had that blue tinge found
in the ice of which glaciers are composed, and its slipperiness made
it almost impossible to walk over it, the ice lying often in ridges
resembling the waves of the sea.
The main crater covers several acres. It is hemmed in by rims of rock,
and is filled with volcanic _débris_, covered with snow and ice.
Numbers of little boiling springs were bubbling up through the bed
of sulphur, and were suggestive of the subterranean fires which once
threw their molten lava over the surrounding country. The view from
the summit was most extensive, and fortunately there was none of the
usual smoke from the forest-fires, so prevalent in autumn in Northern
California and Oregon, to impede the range of vision.
Looking northward, far over into Oregon, we could see her lakes,
valleys, and mountains. Southward, we could trace the Sacramento and
Pitt rivers. The great boundary-wall of the Sierra Nevada lay to the
east, and farther onward, the deserts and sparkling lakes of Utah could
be distinguished. To the west the sinuous outline of the Coast range
was visible, and beyond, the broad Pacific shelved away to the horizon.
Fertile valleys, rugged mountains, wood and water, all lent their aid
to enhance the beauty of this unsurpassable scene.
The descent to our camping-ground was accomplished in a comparatively
short time. On the way, we stopped to witness a most glorious sunset.
Round the horizon ran a thin mist with a brilliant depth of colouring.
To the east a blue gauze seemed to cover each valley as it sank into
night, and the intervening ridges rose with increasing distinctness.
The lower country was flooded with an exquisitely delicate light, and a
few fleecy clouds tinted with gold, pale salmon, and sapphire, passed
over the empurpled hills of the Coast range. The great shadow of Mount
Shasta spread itself, cone-like, across the valley; the blue mists
were quenched; the distant mountains glowed like fairy hills for a few
moments; and the sun, poising itself like a great globe of fire in the
darkening heavens, descended slowly below the golden ridge to illumine
another hemisphere.
During our descent we passed through some patches of red snow, which
leaves a crimson track behind those who cross over it. This curious
phenomenon is always avoided by the Shasta Indians, when acting as
guides or porters, as they say it brings death if you tread on it
willingly and after due warning. We found a warm fire to welcome us
on our arrival at the camp, and the exertions of the day made us very
willing to turn in among the blankets where we slept soundly till long
after daybreak. The following day, when we arrived at our original
starting-point, my companions resumed their journey to San Francisco,
and I went on to Sissons, a station on the stage-road, whence I was to
start on a shooting expedition amongst the Castle Rocks.
Sissons, so-called after the name of the proprietor, is a very
delightful place to spend a few days at. The view of Mount Shasta,
which is directly opposite the house, is magnificent; and Sisson
himself is a capital sportsman guide, and succeeds in making his guests
very comfortable. Looking at Mount Shasta is occupation enough for some
time. The play of colour on the mountain is extraordinary. The lava,
which is of a rosy hue, often penetrates through the snow, and when the
sun shines upon it the effect is most beautiful. The pure white fields
of snow are diversified by great blue glaciers, and when the sunbeams
fall with refracted glory on the veins of ice they exhibit wonderful
tints of opal, green, and pink. The effects produced by the mingling
colours of lava, snow, and ice, and the contrasting shadows of a deep
violet hue are so varied, and the radiation of colour at sunrise and
sunset so vivid, that it is difficult to keep the eyes turned from the
mountain--for nothing seems worthy of consideration in comparison with
Shasta.
_Western Wanderings: a Record of Travel in the Evening Land_ (London,
1874).
FOOTNOTE:
[9] These so-called lions are a sort of panther, and abound in most
parts of California and Oregon. They are very cowardly, and seldom
attack a man, unless they can spring on him from a tree, and not often
then.
THE LAGOONS OF VENICE
(_ITALY_)
JOHN RUSKIN
In the olden days of travelling, now to return no more, in which
distance could not be vanquished without toil, but in which that
toil was rewarded, partly by the power of deliberate survey of the
countries through which the journey lay, and partly by the happiness
of the evening hours, when from the top of the last hill he had
surmounted, the traveller beheld the quiet village where he was to
rest, scattered among the meadows beside its valley stream; or, from
the long hoped for turn in the dusty perspective of the causeway, saw,
for the first time, the towers of some famed city, faint in the rays of
sunset--hours of peaceful and thoughtful pleasure, for which the rush
of the arrival in the railway station is perhaps not always, or to all
men, an equivalent,--in those days, I say, when there was something
more to be anticipated and remembered in the first aspect of each
successive halting-place, than a new arrangement of glass roofing and
iron girder, there were few moments of which the recollection was more
fondly cherished by the travelled, than that which, as I endeavoured
to describe in the close of the last chapter, brought him within sight
of Venice as his gondola shot into the open lagoon from the canal of
Mestre. Not but that the aspect of the city itself was generally the
source of some slight disappointment, for seen in this direction, its
buildings are far less characteristic than those of other great towns
of Italy; but this inferiority was partly disguised by distance, and
more than atoned for by the strange rising of its walls and towers out
of the midst, as it seemed, of the deep sea, for it was impossible that
the mind or the eye could at once comprehend the shallowness of the
vast sheet of water which stretched away in leagues of rippling lustre
to the north and south, or trace the narrow line of islets bounding
it to the east. The salt breeze, the moaning sea-birds, the masses of
black weed separating and disappearing gradually, in knots of heaving
shoal, under the advance of the steady tide, all proclaimed it to be
indeed the ocean on whose bosom the great city rested so calmly; not
such blue, soft, lake-like ocean as bathes the Neapolitan promontories,
or sleeps beneath the marble rocks of Genoa, but a sea with the bleak
power of our own northern waves, yet subdued into a strange spacious
rest, and changed from its angry pallor into a field of burnished
gold, as the sun declined behind the belfry tower of the lonely island
church, fitly named “St. George of the Seaweed.” As the boat drew
nearer to the city, the coast which the traveller had just left sank
behind him into one long, low, sad-coloured line, tufted irregularly
with brushwood and willows; but, at what seemed its northern extremity,
the hills of Arqua rose in a dark cluster of purple pyramids, balanced
on the bright mirage of the lagoon; two or three smooth surges of
inferior hill extended themselves about their roots, and beyond these,
beginning with the craggy peaks above Vicenza, the chain of the Alps
girded the whole horizon to the north--a wall of jagged blue, here and
there showing through its clefts a wilderness of misty precipices,
fading far back into the recesses of Cadore, and itself rising and
breaking away eastward, where the sun struck opposite upon its snow,
into mighty fragments of peaked light, standing up behind the barred
clouds of evening, one after another, countless, the crown of the
Adrian Sea, until the eye turned back from pursuing them, to rest upon
the nearer burning of the campaniles of Murano, and on the great city,
where it magnified itself along the waves, as the quick, silent pacing
of the gondola drew nearer and nearer. And at last, when its walls were
reached, and the outmost of its untrodden streets was entered, not
through towered gate or guarded rampart, but as a deep inlet between
two rocks of coral in the Indian sea; when first upon the traveller’s
sight opened the long ranges of columned palaces,--each with its black
boat moored at the portal,--each with its image cast down, beneath
its feet, upon that green pavement which every breeze broke into new
fantasies of rich tessellation; when first, at the extremity of the
bright vista, the shadowy Rialto threw its colossal curve slowly forth
from behind the palace of the Camerlenghi; that strange curve, so
delicate, so adamantine, strong as a mountain cavern, graceful as a bow
just bent; when first, before its moonlike circumference was all risen,
the gondolier’s cry, “Ah! Stalì,” struck sharp upon the ear, and the
prow turned aside under the mighty cornices that half met over the
narrow canal, where the splash of the water followed close and loud,
ringing along the marble by the boat’s side; and when at last that boat
darted forth upon the breadth of silver sea, across which the front of
the Ducal palace, flushed with its sanguine veins, looks to the snowy
dome of Our Lady of Salvation, it was no marvel that the mind should
be so deeply entranced by the visionary charm of a scene so beautiful
and so strange, as to forget the darker truths of its history and its
being. Well might it seem that such a city had owed her existence
rather to the rod of the enchanter, than the fear of the fugitive; that
the waters which encircled her had been chosen for the mirror of her
state, rather than the shelter of her nakedness; and that all which in
nature was wild or merciless;--Time and Decay, as well as the waves and
tempests,--had been won to adorn her instead of to destroy, and might
still spare, for ages to come, that beauty which seemed to have fixed
for its throne the sands of the hour-glass as well as of the sea.
[Illustration: THE CITY OF THE LAGOONS.]
From the mouths of the Adige to those of the Piave there stretches,
at a variable distance of from three to five miles from the actual
shore, a bank of sand, divided into long islands by narrow channels of
sea. The space between this bank and the true shore consists of the
sedimentary deposits from these and other rivers, a great plain of
calcareous mud, covered, in the neighbourhood of Venice, by the sea
at high water, to the depth in most places of a foot or a foot and a
half, and nearly everywhere exposed at low tide, but divided by an
intricate network of narrow and winding channels, from which the sea
never retires. In some places, according to the run of the currents,
the land has risen into marshy islets, consolidated, some by art, and
some by time, into ground firm enough to be built upon, or fruitful
enough to be cultivated; in others, on the contrary, it has not reached
the sea level; so that, at the average low water, shallow lakelets
glitter among its irregularly exposed fields of seaweed. In the midst
of the largest of these, increased in importance by the confluence
of several large river channels towards one of the openings in the
sea bank, the city of Venice itself is built, on a crowded cluster of
islands; the various plots of higher ground which appear to the north
and south of this central cluster, have at different periods been also
thickly inhabited, and now bear, according to their size, the remains
of cities, villages, or isolated convents and churches, scattered among
spaces of open ground, partly waste and encumbered by ruins, partly
under cultivation for the supply of the metropolis.