considerably with the season); but this fall, on so flat a shore, is
enough to cause continual movement in the waters, and in the main
canals to produce a reflux which frequently runs like a mill stream.
At high water no land is visible for many miles to the north or south
of Venice, except in the form of small islands crowned with towers or
gleaming with villages; there is a channel, some three miles wide,
between the city and the mainland, and some mile and a half wide
between it and the sandy breakwater called the Lido, which divides the
lagoon from the Adriatic, but which is so low as hardly to disturb
the impression of the city’s having been built in the midst of the
ocean, although the secret of its true position is partly, yet not
painfully, betrayed by the clusters of piles set to mark the deep
water channels, which undulate far away in spotty chains like the
studded backs of huge sea-snakes, and by the quick glittering of the
crisped and crowded waves that flicker and dance before the strong
winds upon the unlifted level of the shallow sea. But the scene is
widely different at low tide. A fall of eighteen or twenty inches is
enough to show ground over the greater part of the lagoon; and at the
complete ebb, the city is seen standing in the midst of a dark plain
of seaweed, of gloomy green, except only where the larger branches
of the Brenta and its associated streams converge towards the port
of the Lido. Through this salt and sombre plain the gondola and the
fishing-boat advance by tortuous channels, seldom more than four or
five feet deep, and often so choked with slime that the heavier keels
furrow the bottom till their crossing tracks are seen through the
clear sea water like the ruts upon a wintry road, and the oar leaves
the gashes upon the ground at every stroke, or is entangled among the
thick weed that fringes the banks with the weight of its sullen waves,
leaning to and fro upon the uncertain sway of the exhausted tide. The
scene is often profoundly oppressive, even at this day, when every plot
of higher ground bears some fragment of fair building: but, in order to
know what it was once, let the traveller follow in his boat at evening
the windings of some unfrequented channel far into the midst of the
melancholy plain; let him remove in his imagination, the brightness
of the great city that still extends itself in the distance, and the
walls and towers from the islands that are near; and so wait, until
the bright investiture and sweet warmth of the sunset are withdrawn
from the waters, and the black desert of their shore lies in its
nakedness beneath the night, pathless, comfortless, infirm, lost in
dark languor and fearful silence, except where the salt rivulets plash
into the tideless pools, or the sea-birds flit from their margins with
a questioning cry; and he will be enabled to enter in some sort into
the horror of heart with which this solitude was anciently chosen by
man for his habitation. They little thought, who first drove the stakes
into the sand, and strewed the ocean reeds for their rest, that their
children were to be the princes of the ocean, and their palaces its
pride; and yet, in the great natural laws that rule that sorrowful
wilderness, let it be remembered what strange preparation had been made
for the things which no human imagination could have foretold, and how
the whole existence and fortune of the Venetian nation were anticipated
or compelled, by the setting of those bars and doors to the rivers and
the sea. Had deeper currents divided their islands, hostile navies
would again and again have reduced the rising city into servitude; had
stronger surges beaten their shores, all the riches and refinement of
the Venetian architecture must have been exchanged for the walls and
bulwarks of an ordinary seaport. Had there been no tide, as in other
parts of the Mediterranean, the narrow canals of the city would have
become noisome, and the marsh in which it was built pestiferous. Had
the tide been only a foot or eighteen inches higher in its rise, the
water access to the doors of the palaces would have been impossible:
even as it is, there is sometimes a little difficulty, at the ebb, in
landing without setting foot upon the lower and slippery steps; and the
highest tides sometimes enter the courtyards, and overflow the entrance
halls. Eighteen inches more of difference between the level of the
flood and ebb would have rendered the doorsteps of every palace, at low
water, a treacherous mass of weeds and limpets, and the entire system
of water-carriage for the higher classes, in their easy and daily
intercourse, must have been done away with. The streets of the city
would have been widened, its network of canals filled up, and all the
peculiar character of the place and the people destroyed.
The reader may perhaps have felt some pain in the contrast between this
faithful view of the site of the Venetian Throne, and the romantic
conception of it which we ordinarily form; but this pain, if he have
felt it, ought to be more than counterbalanced by the value of the
instance thus afforded to us at once of the inscrutableness and the
wisdom of the ways of God. If, two thousand years ago, we had been
permitted to watch the slow setting of the shrine of those turbid
rivers into the polluted sea, and the gaining upon its deep and fresh
waters of the lifeless, impassable, unvoyageable plain, how little
could we have understood the purpose with which those islands were
shaped out of the void, and the torpid waters enclosed with their
desolate walls of sand! How little could we have known, any more than
of what now seems to us most distressful, dark, and objectless, the
glorious aim which was then in the mind of Him in whose hands are all
the corners of the earth! how little imagined that in the laws which
were stretching forth the gloomy margins of those fruitless banks,
and feeding the bitter grass among their shallows, there was indeed a
preparation, and _the only preparation possible_, for the founding of
a city which was to be set like a golden clasp on the girdle of the
earth, to write her history on the white scrolls of the sea-surges,
and to word it in their thunder, and to gather and give forth, in
world-wide pulsation, the glory of the West and of the East, from the
burning heart of her Fortitude and Splendour!
_The Stones of Venice_ (Sunnyside, Orpington, Kent, 1886).
THE CATARACTS OF THE NILE
(_AFRICA_)
AMELIA B. EDWARDS
At Assûan one bids good-bye to Egypt and enters Nubia through the gates
of the Cataract--which is, in truth, no cataract, but a succession of
rapids extending over two-thirds of the distance between Elephantine
and Philæ. The Nile--diverted from its original course by some
unrecorded catastrophe, the nature of which has given rise to much
scientific conjecture--here spreads itself over a rocky basin bounded
by sand slopes on the one side, and by granite cliffs on the other.
Studded with numerous islets, divided into numberless channels, foaming
over sunken rocks, eddying among water-worn boulders, now shallow,
now deep, now loitering, now hurrying, here sleeping in the ribbed
hollow of a tiny sand-drift, there circling above the vortex of a
hidden whirlpool, the river, whether looked upon from the deck of the
dahabeeyah, or the heights above the shore, is seen everywhere to be
fighting its way through a labyrinth, the paths of which have never yet
been mapped or sounded.
These paths are everywhere difficult and everywhere dangerous; and
to that labyrinth the Shellalee, or Cataract Arab, alone possesses
the key. At the time of the inundation, when all but the highest
rocks are under water, and navigation is as easy here as elsewhere,
the Shellalee’s occupation is gone. But as the floods subside and
travellers begin to reappear, his work commences. To haul dahabeeyahs
up those treacherous rapids by sheer stress of rope and muscle; to
steer skillfully down again through channels bristling with rocks and
boiling with foam, becomes now, for some five months of the year, his
principal industry. It is hard work; but he gets well paid for it, and
his profits are always on the increase. From forty to fifty dahabeeyahs
are annually taken up between November and March; and every year brings
a larger influx of travellers. Meanwhile, accidents rarely happen;
prices tend continually upward; and the Cataract Arabs make a little
fortune by their singular monopoly.
The scenery of the First Cataract is like nothing else in the
world--except the scenery of the Second. It is altogether new and
strange and beautiful. It is incomprehensible that travellers should
have written of it in general with so little admiration. They seem to
have been impressed by the wildness of the waters, by the quaint forms
of the rocks, by the desolation and grandeur of the landscape as a
whole; but scarcely at all by its beauty--which is paramount.
The Nile here widens to a lake. Of the islands, which it would hardly
be an exaggeration to describe as some hundreds in number, no two are
alike. Some are piled up like the rocks at the Land’s End in Cornwall,
block upon block, column upon column, tower upon tower, as if reared by
the hand of man. Some are green with grass; some golden with slopes of
drifted sand; some are planted with rows of blossoming lupins, purple
and white. Others are again mere cairns of loose blocks, with here and
there a perilously balanced top-boulder. On one, a singular upright
monolith, like a menhir, stands conspicuous, as if placed there to
commemorate a date, or to point the way to Philæ. Another mass rises
out of the water squared and buttressed, in the likeness of a fort. A
third, humped and shining like the wet body of some amphibious beast,
lifts what seems to be a horned head above the surface of the rapids.
All these blocks and boulders and fantastic rocks are granite; some
red, some purple, some black. Their forms are rounded by the friction
of ages. Those nearest the brink reflect the sky like mirrors of
burnished steel. Royal ovals and hieroglyphed inscriptions, fresh as
of yesterday’s cutting, stand out here and there from those glittering
surfaces with startling distinctness. A few of the larger islands
are crowned with clumps of palms; and one, the loveliest of any, is
completely embowered in gum-trees and acacias, dôm and date-palms, and
feathery tamarisks, all festooned together under a hanging canopy of
yellow-blossomed creepers.
[Illustration: FIRST CATARACT OF THE NILE.]
On a brilliant Sunday morning, with a favourable wind, we entered on
this fairy archipelago. Sailing steadily against the current, we glided
away from Assûan, left Elephantine behind, and found ourselves at
once in the midst of the islands. From this moment every turn of the
tiller disclosed a fresh point of view, and we sat on deck, spectators
of a moving panorama. The diversity of subjects was endless. The
combinations of form and colour, of light and shadow, of foreground and
distance, were continually changing. A boat or a few figures alone were
wanting to complete the picturesqueness of the scene, but in all those
channels and among all those islands, we saw no sign of any living
creature.
The Second or Great Cataract, begins a little way above Wady Halfeh
and extends over a distance of many miles. It consists, like the First
Cataract, of a succession of rocks and rapids, and is skirted for
the first five miles or so by the sand-cliff ridge, which, as I have
said, forms a background to the ruins just opposite Wady Halfeh. This
ridge terminates abruptly in the famous precipice known as the Rock of
Abusîr. Only adventurous travellers bound for Dongola or Khartûm go
beyond this point; and they, for the most part, take the shorter route
across the desert from Korosko.
It is hard, now that we are actually here, to realize that this is
the end of our journey. The Cataract--an immense multitude of black
and shining islets, among which the river, divided into hundreds of
separate channels, spreads far and wide for a distance, it is said of
more than sixteen miles,--foams at our feet. Foams, and frets, and
falls; gushing smooth and strong where its course is free; murmuring
hoarsely where it is interrupted; now hurrying; now loitering; here
eddying in oily circles; there lying in still pools unbroken by a
ripple; everywhere full of life, full of voices; everywhere shining to
the sun. Northwards, when it winds away towards Abou Simbel, we see
all the fantastic mountains of yesterday on the horizon. To the east,
still bounded by out-liers of the same disconnected chain, lies a
rolling waste of dark and stony wilderness, trenched with innumerable
valleys through which flow streams of sand. On the western side, the
continuity of the view is interrupted by the ridge which ends with
Abusîr. Southward the Libyan desert reaches away in one vast undulating
plain; tawny, arid, monotonous; all sun; all sand; lit here and there
with arrowy flashes of the Nile. Farthest of all, pale but distinct, on
the outermost rim of the world, rise two mountain summits, one long,
one dome-like. Our Nubians tell us that they are the mountains of
Dongola. Comparing our position with that of the Third Cataract as it
appears upon the map, we come to the conclusion that these ghost-like
silhouettes are the summits of Mount Fogo and Mount Arambo--two
apparently parallel mountains situate on opposite sides of the river
about ten miles below Hannek, and consequently about one hundred and
forty-five miles, as the bird flies, from the spot on which we are
standing.
In this extraordinary panorama, so wild, so weird, so desolate, there
is nothing really beautiful, except the colour. But the colour is
transcendent. Never, even in Egypt, have I seen anything so tender, so
transparent, so harmonious. I shut my eyes, and it all comes before
me. I see the amber of the sands; the pink and pearly mountains; the
Cataract rocks all black and purple and polished; the dull grey palms
that cluster here and there upon the larger islands; the vivid verdure
of the tamarisks and pomegranates; the Nile, a greenish brown flecked
with yeasty foam; over all, the blue and burning sky, permeated with
light, and palpitating with sunshine.
I made no sketch. I felt that it would be ludicrous to attempt it. And
I feel now that any endeavour to put the scene into words is a mere
presumptuous effort to describe the indescribable. Words are useful
instruments; but, like the etching needle and the burin, they stop
short at form. They cannot translate colour.
If a traveller pressed for time asked me whether he should or should
not go as far as the Second Cataract, I think I should recommend him to
turn back from Abou Simbel. The trip must cost four days; and if the
wind should happen to be unfavourable either way, it may cost six or
seven. The forty miles of river that have to be twice traversed are the
dullest on the Nile; the Cataract is but an enlarged and barren edition
of the Cataract between Assûan and Philæ; and the great view, as I have
said, has not that kind of beauty which attracts the general tourist.
It has an interest, however, beyond and apart from that of beauty. It
rouses one’s imagination to a sense of the greatness of the Nile. We
look across a world of desert, and see the river still coming from
afar. We have reached a point at which all that is habitable and
familiar comes abruptly to an end. Not a village, not a bean-field, not
a shâdûf, not a sakkieh, is to be seen in the plain below. There is no
sail on these dangerous waters. There is no moving creature on these
pathless sands. But for the telegraphic wires stalking ghost-like,
across the desert, it would seem as if we had touched the limit of
civilization, and were standing on the threshold of a land unexplored.
Yet for all this, we feel as if we were at only the beginning of the
mighty river. We have journeyed well-nigh a thousand miles against the
stream; but what is that to the distance which still lies between us
and the Great Lakes? And how far beyond the Great Lakes must we seek
for the source that is even yet undiscovered?
_A Thousand Miles Up the Nile_ (London, 1890).
IN THE ALPS
(_SWITZERLAND_)
THÉOPHILE GAUTIER
The foot of the high mountains that form the chain of Mount Blanc,
clothed with forests and pastures, revealed hues of delightful
intensity and vigour. Imagine an immense piece of green velvet crumpled
into large folds like the curtain of a theatre with the deep black of
its hollows and the golden glitterings of its lights; this is a very
faint image for the grandeur of the object, but I know of none that
could better describe the effect.
Scheele’s green, mineral green, all those greens that result from the
combinations of Prussian blue and yellow ochre, or Naples yellow, the
mixture of indigo and Indian yellow, Veronese green and _vert prasin_
could not reproduce that quality of green that we might properly call
mountain green and which passes from velvety black into the tenderest
shades of green. In this play of shades, the firs form the shadows;
the deciduous trees and the spaces of meadow or moss, the lights. The
undulations and the cleft ravines of the mountain break these great
masses of green, this vigorous foreground, this energetic _répoussoir_,
rendering the light tones of the zones, (bare of verdure and crowned by
the high lights of the snows,) more vaporous and throwing them back. In
the various more open places, the grass grows green in the sun; and
trees resembling little black patches sown upon this light ground give
it the appearance of tufted material. But when we speak of trees and
firs, woods and forests, do not picture to yourselves anything but vast
blots of dark moss upon the slopes of the mountains: the highest trunks
there assume the proportion of a blade of grass.
The road turns towards the left, and, gliding between stones and blocks
that have fallen down or drifted into the valley by means of the
winter torrents and avalanches, soon enters a forest of birch-trees,
firs, and larches whose openings allow you to see on the other side
the _Aiguilles Rouges_ and _le Brevent_, which face Montanvert. The
ascent was gentle enough and the mules climbed it with easy gait;
in comparison with the road which we scaled the night before to go
to the _Pierre pointue_, the route was a true alley of the Bois de
Boulogne. The zigzags of the road turned at angles sufficiently long
not to fatigue either the rider or his mount. The sunlight played in
the foliage of the forest that we traversed and made a shadow shot
through with rays float over us. Upon the rocks at the foot of the
trees, mosses of emerald green gleamed and lovely little wild flowers
brightly bloomed, while in the spaces through the branches a bluish
mist betrayed the depth of the abyss, for the little caravan, going
along single file and constantly ascending, had now reached the Caillet
fountain, which is regarded as half-way up the mountain. This fountain,
of excellent water, runs into a wooden trough. The mules halt there to
drink. A cabin is built near the fountain and they offer you a glass
of water made opalescent with a few drops of kirsch, cognac, beer,
and other refreshments. We regaled our guides with a glass of brandy,
which, notwithstanding their sobriety, they seemed to prefer to that
diamond liquid that sprang from the rock.
From this point, the road began to grow steeper; the ascents multiplied
without, however, offering any difficulties to mules or pedestrians.
The air became more keen. The forest grew lighter, the trees stood at
greater intervals from each other and stopped as if out of breath. They
seemed to say to us, “Now, go up alone, we cannot go any further.” The
rounded plateau that we mount by keeping to the right is not desolate
and denuded as one would believe; a grass, sturdy enough and enamelled
with Alpine flowers, forms its carpet, and when you have gone beyond
it, you perceive the _châlet_ or inn of Montanvert below the _Aiguille
de Charmoz_.
From this plateau you have a superb view, an astonishing, apocalyptic
view, beyond all dreams. At your feet, between two banks of gigantic
peaks, flows motionless, as if congealed during the tumult of a
tempest, that broad river of crystal which is called the Mer de Glace,
and which lower towards the plain is called the _Glacier des Bois_. The
_Mer de Glace_ comes from a high altitude; it receives many glaciers
as a river its tributaries. We will speak of it presently, but for the
moment let us occupy ourselves with the spectacle that unfolds beneath
our eyes.
Opposite the inn of Montanvert, the glacier is half a league from one
bank to the other, perhaps even more, for it is difficult to gauge
distance in the mountains with exactness; it is about the width of
the Thames, the Neva or the Guadalquiver towards their mouth. But the
slope is much more abrupt than was ever that of any river. It descends
by large waves rounded at their tops, like billows that never break
into foam and whose hollows take a bluish colour. When the ground
that serves as a bed for this torrent of ice becomes too abrupt, the
mass is dislocated and breaks up into slabs that rest one upon the
other and which resemble those little columns of white marble in the
Turkish cemeteries that are forced to lean to right or left by their
own weight; crevasses more or less wide and deep manifest themselves,
opening the immense block and revealing the virgin ice in all its
purity. The walls of these crevasses assume magical colours, tints of
an azure grotto. An ideal blue that is neither the blue of the sky nor
the blue of the water, but the blue of ice, an unnamed tone that is
never found on the artist’s palette illumines these splendid clefts
and turns sometimes to a green of aqua marine or mother of pearl by
gradations of astonishing delicacy. On the other bank, clearly detached
by its sharp escarpment like the spire of a gigantic cathedral, the
high _Aiguille du Dru_ rises with so proud, so elegant, and so bold a
spring. Ascending the glacier, the _Aiguille Verte_ stands out in front
of it, being even higher though the perspective makes it appear lower.
From the foot of the _Aiguille du Dru_, like a rivulet towards a river,
descends the Mont Blanc glacier. A little further to the right, the
_Aiguille du Moine_ and that of _Léchaud_ show themselves, obelisks
of granite which the sunlight tints with reflections of rose and
the snow makes gleam with several touches of silver. It is difficult
to express in words the unexpected outlines, the strange flashes, the
tops cut and indented in the form of saw-teeth, gable-ends and crosses
that are affected by these inaccessible peaks with almost vertical
walls,--often even sloping outwards and overhanging. Running your eye
along the same bank of the glacier and descending towards the valley,
you see the _Aiguille du Bochard_, _le Chapeau_, which is nothing more
or less than a rounded mountain, grassy and enamelled with flowers, not
so high as Montanvert, and the forests which have given to this portion
of the _Mer de Glace_ the name of _Glacier des Bois_, bordering it with
a line of sombre verdure.
[Illustration: MONT BLANC.]
There are in the _Mer de Glace_ two veins that divide it throughout its
length like the currents of two rivers that never mingle: a black vein
and a white vein. The black one flows by the side of the bank where
the _Aiguille du Dru_ rears itself, and the white one bathes the foot
of Montanvert; but words when we speak of colour only half describe
shades, and it must not be imagined that this demarcation is as clearly
defined as we have indicated. It is, however, very sensible.
On looking towards the upper portion of the glacier, at the spot
where it precipitates itself into the rock passage which conducts
it to the valley like a furiously boiling cascade with wild spurts
which some magic power has turned into ice at its strongest leap, you
discover, arranged like an amphitheatre, the _Montagne des Périades_,
the _Petites Jorasses_, the _Grandes Jorasses_, and the _Aiguille du
Géant_, covered with eternal snow, the white diadem of the Alps which
the suns of summer are powerless to melt and which scintillate with a
pure and cold brilliancy in the clear blue of the sky.
At the foot of the Périades, the glacier, as may be seen from
Montanvert, divides into two branches, one of which ascends towards the
east and takes the name of the _Glacier de Léchaud_, while the other
takes its course behind the _Aiguilles de Chamouni_ towards _Mont Blanc
du Tacul_, and is called the _Glacier du Géant_. A third branch, named
the _Glacier du Talifre_, spreads out over the slopes of the _Aiguille
Verte_.
It is in the middle of the _Talifre_ where lies that oasis of the
glaciers that is called the _Jardin_, a kind of basket of Alpine
flowers, which find there a pinch of vegetable earth, a few rays
of sunshine, and a girdle of stones that isolate them from the
neighbouring ice; but to climb to the _Jardin_ is a long, fatiguing and
even dangerous excursion, necessitating a night’s sleep at the _châlet_
of Montanvert.