rhododendrons of the freshest green and brightest rose, that opened in
the liberty and solitude of the mountains by means of the pure Alpine
breeze. You descend by the same route more rapidly than you ascended.
[Illustration: AIGUILLE DU DRU, ALPS.]
The mules stepped gaily by the side of their leaders, who carried the
sticks, canes and umbrellas, which had now become useless. We traversed
the forest of pines pierced here and there by the torrents of stones
of the avalanches; we gained the plain and were soon at Chamouni to go
to the source of the Arveiron, which is found at the base of the
_Glacier des Bois_, the name that is assumed by the _Mer de Glace_ on
arriving in the valley.
This is an excursion that you can make in a carriage. You follow the
bottom of the valley, cross the Arve at the hamlet of Praz, and after
having passed the _Hameau des Bois_, where you must alight, you arrive,
winding among masses of rocks in disorder and pools of water across
which logs are placed, at the wall of the glacier, which reveals itself
by its slit and tortured edges, full of cavities and gashes where the
blue-green hatchings colour the transparent whiteness of the mass.
The white teeth of the glacier stand out clearly against the sombre
green of the forests of Bochard and Montanvert and are majestically
dominated by the _Aiguille du Dru_, which shoots its granite obelisk
three thousand nine hundred and six _metres_ into the depths of the
sky, and the foreground is formed by the most prodigious confusion of
stones, rocks and blocks that a painter could wish for giving value to
those vapourous depths. The Arveiron foams and roars across this chaos
and, after half an hour of frantic disordered course, loses itself in
the Arve.
_Les Vacances de Lundi_ (Paris, 1881).
THE VALE OF KASHMIR
(_INDIA_)
ANDREW WILSON
Almost every one longs, and many hope, to see the beautiful Vale of
Kashmir. Probably no region of the earth is so well known to the eye of
imagination, or so readily suggests the idea of a terrestrial Paradise.
So far from having been disappointed with the reality, or having
experienced any cause for wishing that I had left Kashmir unvisited, I
can most sincerely say that the beautiful reality excels the somewhat
vague poetic vision which has been associated with the name. But
Kashmir is rather a difficult country to get at, especially when you
come down upon it from behind by way of Zanskar and Súrú. According to
tradition, it was formerly the Garden of Eden; and one is very well
disposed to accept that theory when trying to get into it from the
north or northwest.
After months of the sterile, almost treeless Tibetan provinces, the
contrast was very striking, and I could not but revel in the beauty and
glory of the vegetation; but even to one who had come up upon it from
below, the scene would have been very striking. There was a large and
lively encampment at the foot of the pass, with tents prepared for the
Yarkand envoy, and a number of Kashmir officers and soldiers; but I
pushed on beyond that, and camped in solitude close to the Sind river,
just beneath the Panjtarne valley, which leads up towards the caves
of Ambernath, a celebrated place for Hindú pilgrimage. This place is
called Báltal, but it has no human habitations. Smooth green meadows,
carpet-like and embroidered with flowers, extended to the silvery
stream, above which there was the most varied luxuriance of foliage,
the lower mountains being most richly clothed with woods of many and
beautiful colours. It was late autumn, and the trees were in their
greatest variety of colour; but hardly a leaf seemed to have fallen.
The dark green of the pines contrasted beautifully with the delicate
orange of the birches, because there were intermingling tints of brown
and saffron. Great masses of foliage were succeeded by solitary pines,
which had found a footing high up the precipitous crags.
And all this was combined with peaks and slopes of pure white snow.
_Aiguilles_ of dark rock rose out of beds of snow, but their faces were
powdered with the same element. Glaciers and long beds of snow ran down
the valleys, and the upper vegetation had snow for its bed. The effect
of sunset upon this scene was wonderful; for the colours it displayed
were both heightened and more harmoniously blended. The golden light
of eve brought out the warm tints of the forest; but the glow of the
reddish-brown precipices, and the rosy light upon the snowy slopes and
peaks, were too soon succeeded by the cold grey of evening. At first,
however, the wondrous scene was still visible in a quarter-moon’s
silvery light, in which the Panjtarne valley was in truth--
“A wild romantic chasm that slanted
Down the sweet hill athwart a cedarn cover--
A savage place, as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath the waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon lover.”
The demon lovers to be met with in that wild valley are bears, which
are in abundance, and a more delightful place for a hunter to spend a
month in could hardly be invented; but he would have to depend on his
rifle for supplies, or have them sent up from many miles down the Sind
valley.
The remainder of my journey down the latter valley to the great valley
or small plain of Kashmir was delightful. A good deal of rain fell, but
that made one appreciate the great trees all the more, for the rain was
not continuous, and was mingled with sunshine. At times, during the
season when I saw it, this “inland depth” is “roaring like the sea;”
“While trees, dim-seen in frenzied numbers tear
The lingering remnant of their yellow hair;”
but soon after it is bathed in perfect peace and mellow sunlight.
The air was soft and balmy; but, at this transfer from September to
October, it was agreeably cool even to a traveller from the abodes and
sources of snow. As we descended, the pine-forests were confined to the
mountain-slopes; but the lofty deodar began to appear in the valley,
as afterwards the sycamore, the elm, and the horse-chestnut. Round
the picturesque villages, and even forming considerable woods, there
were fruit-trees--as the walnut, the chestnut, the peach, the apricot,
the apple, and the pear. Large quantities of timber (said to be cut
recklessly) was in course of being floated down the river; and where
the path led across it there were curious wooden bridges for which it
was not necessary to dismount. This Sind valley is about sixty miles
long, and varies in breadth from a few hundred yards to about a mile,
except at its base, where it opens out considerably. It is considered
to afford the best idea of the mingled beauty and grandeur of Kashmir
scenery; and when I passed through its appearance was greatly enhanced
by the snow, which not only covered the mountain-tops, but also came
down into the forests which clothed the mountain-sides. The path
through it, being part of the great road from Kashmir to Central Asia,
is kept in tolerable repair, and it is very rarely that the rider
requires to dismount. Anything beyond a walking-pace, however, is for
the most part out of the question. Montgomerie divides the journey from
Srinagar to Báltal (where I camped below the Zoji La) into six marches,
making in all sixty-seven miles; and though two of these marches may be
done in one day, yet if you are to travel easily and enjoy the scenery,
one a day is sufficient. The easiest double march is from Sonamarg to
Gond, and I did it in a day with apparent ease on a very poor pony;
but the consequence is that I beat my brains in order to recall what
sort of a place Gond was, no distinct recollection of it having been
left on my mind, except of a grove of large trees and a roaring fire in
front of my tent at night. Sonamarg struck me as a very pleasant place;
and I had there, in the person of a youthful captain from Abbotabad,
the pleasure of meeting the first European I had seen since leaving
Lahaul. We dined together, and I found he had come up from Srinagar
to see Sonamarg, and he spoke with great enthusiasm of a view he had
had, from another part of Kashmir, of the 26,000 feet mountain Nanga
Parbat. _Marg_ means “meadow,” and seems to be applied especially to
elevated meadows; _sona_ stands for “golden”: and this place is a
favourite resort in the hot malarious months of July and August, both
for Europeans in Kashmir and for natives of rank.
At Ganderbahl I was fairly in the great valley of Kashmir, and encamped
under some enormous _chúnár_ or sycamore trees; the girth of one was so
great that its trunk kept my little mountain-tent quite sheltered from
the furious blasts. Truly--
“There was a roaring in the wind all night,
The rain fell heavily, and fell in floods,
but that gigantic _chúnár_ kept off both wind and rain wonderfully.
Next day a small but convenient and quaint Kashmir boat took me up
to Srinagar; and it was delightful to glide up the backwaters of
the Jhelam, which afforded a highway to the capital. It was the
commencement and the promise of repose, which I very sadly needed, and
in a beautiful land.
[Illustration: THE VALE OF KASHMIR.]
I afterwards went up to Islamabad, Martand, Achibal, Vernag, the Rozlú
valley, and finally went out of Kashmir by way of the Manas and Wúlar
Lakes, and the lower valley of the Jhelam, so that I saw the most
interesting places in the country, and all the varieties of scenery
which it affords. That country has been so often visited and described,
that, with one or two exceptions, I shall only touch generally upon its
characteristics. It doubtless owes some of its charm to the character
of the regions in its neighbourhood. As compared with the burning
plains of India, the sterile steppes of Tibet, and the savage mountains
of the Himalaya and of Afghanistan, it presents an astonishing and
beautiful contrast. After such scenes even a much more commonplace
country might have afforded a good deal of the enthusiasm which Kashmir
has excited in Eastern poetry, and even in common rumour; but beyond
that it has characteristics which give it a distinct place among the
most pleasing regions of the earth. I said to the Maharajah, or ruling
Prince of Kashmir, that the most beautiful countries I had seen were
England, Italy, Japan, and Kashmir; and though he did not seem to like
the remark much, probably from a fear that the beauty of the land he
governed might make it too much an object of desire, yet there was
no exaggeration in it. Here, at a height of nearly 6,000 feet, in
a temperate climate, with abundance of moisture, and yet protected
by lofty mountains from the fierce continuous rains of the Indian
southwest monsoon, we have the most splendid amphitheatre in the world.
A flat oval valley about sixty miles long, and from forty in breadth,
is surrounded by magnificent mountains, which, during the greater part
of the year, are covered more than half-way down with snow, and present
vast upland beds of pure white snow. This valley has fine lakes, is
intersected with water-courses, and its land is covered with brilliant
vegetation, including gigantic trees of the richest foliage. And out
of this great central valley there rise innumerable, long, picturesque
mountain-valleys, such as that of the Sind river, which I have just
described; while above these there are great pine-forests, green slopes
of grass, glaciers, and snow. Nothing could express the general effect
better than Moore’s famous lines on sainted Lebanon--
“Whose head in wintry grandeur towers,
And whitens with eternal sleet;
While Summer, in a vale of flowers,
Is sleeping rosy at his feet.”
The great encircling walls of rock and snow contrast grandly with the
soft beauty of the scene beneath. The snows have a wonderful effect as
we look up to them through the leafy branches of the immense _chúnár_,
elm, and poplar trees. They flash gloriously in the morning sunlight
above the pink mist of the valley-plain; they have a rosy glow in the
evening sunlight; and when the sunlight has departed, but ere darkness
shrouds them, they gleam, afar off, with a cold and spectral light, as
if they belonged to a region where man had never trod. The deep black
gorges in the mountains have a mysterious look. The sun lights up some
softer grassy ravine or green slope, and then displays splintered rocks
rising in the wildest confusion. Often long lines of white clouds lie
along the line of mountain-summits, while at other times every white
peak and precipice-wall is distinctly marked against the deep-blue
sky. The valley-plain is especially striking in clear mornings and
evenings, where it lies partly in golden sunlight, partly in the shadow
of its great hills.
The green mosaic of the level land is intersected by many streams,
canals or lakes, or beautiful reaches of river which look like small
lakes. The lakes have floating islands composed of vegetation. Besides
the immense _chúnárs_ and elms, and the long lines of stately poplars,
great part of the plain is a garden filled with fruits and flowers, and
there is almost constant verdure.
“There eternal summer dwells,
And west winds, with musky wing,
About the cedar’d alleys fling
Nard and cassia’s balmy smells.”
_Travel, Adventure and Sport from Blackwood’s Magazine_ (Edinburgh and
London), Vol. vi.
THE LAKE OF PITCH
(_TRINIDAD_)
CHARLES KINGSLEY
This Pitch Lake should be counted among the wonders of the world; for
it is, certainly, tolerably big. It covers ninety-nine acres, and
contains millions of tons of so-called pitch.
Its first discoverers were not bound to see that a pitch lake of
ninety-nine acres was no more wonderful than any of the little pitch
wells--“spues” or “galls,” as we should call them in Hampshire--a yard
across; or any one of the tiny veins and lumps of pitch which abound in
the surrounding forests; and no less wonderful than if it had covered
ninety-nine thousand acres instead of ninety-nine.
As we neared the shore, we perceived that the beach was black with
pitch; and the breeze being off the land, the asphalt smell (not
unpleasant) came off to welcome us. We rowed in, and saw in front of a
little row of wooden houses, a tall mulatto, in blue policeman’s dress,
gesticulating and shouting to us. He was the ward policeman, and I
found him (as I did all the coloured police) able and courteous, shrewd
and trusty. These police are excellent specimens of what can be made of
the Negro, or Half-Negro, if he be but first drilled, and then given a
responsibility which calls out his self-respect. He was warning our
crew not to run aground on one or other of the pitch reefs, which here
take the place of rocks. A large one, a hundred yards off on the left,
has been almost all dug away, and carried to New York or to Paris to
make asphalt pavement.
The boat was run ashore, under his directions, on a spit of sand
between the pitch; and when she ceased bumping up and down in the
muddy surf, we scrambled out into a world exactly the hue of its
inhabitants--of every shade, from jet-black to copper-brown. The
pebbles on the shore were pitch. A tide-pool close by was enclosed in
pitch: a four-eyes was swimming about in it, staring up at us; and when
we hunted him, tried to escape, not by diving, but by jumping on shore
on the pitch, and scrambling off between our legs. While the policeman,
after profoundest courtesies, was gone to get a mule-cart to take us up
to the lake, and planks to bridge its water-channels, we took a look
round at this oddest of the corners of the earth.
In front of us was the unit of civilization--the police-station, wooden
on wooden stilts (as all well-built houses are here), to ensure a
draught of air beneath them. We were, of course, asked to come and sit
down, but preferred looking around, under our umbrellas; for the heat
was intense. The soil is half pitch, half brown earth, among which
the pitch sweals in and out, as tallow sweals from a candle. It is
always in slow motion under the heat of the tropic sun: and no wonder
if some of the cottages have sunk right and left in such a treacherous
foundation. A stone or brick house could not stand here: but wood and
palm-thatch are both light and tough enough to be safe, let the ground
give way as it will.
The soil, however, is very rich. The pitch certainly does not injure
vegetation, though plants will not grow actually in it. The first
plants which caught our eyes were pine-apples; for which La Brea is
famous. The heat of the soil, as well as of the air, brings them to
special perfection. They grow about anywhere, unprotected by hedge or
fence; for the Negroes here seem honest enough, at least towards each
other. And at the corner of the house was a bush worth looking at, for
we had heard of it for many a year. It bore prickly, heart-shaped pods
an inch long, filled with seeds coated with a rich waxy pulp.
This was a famous plant--Bixa, Orellana, Roucou; and that pulp was
the well-known Arnotta dye of commerce. In England and Holland, it is
used merely, I believe, to colour cheeses; but in the Spanish Main, to
colour human beings. As we went onward up the gentle slope (the rise
is one hundred and thirty-eight feet in rather more than a mile), the
ground became more and more full of pitch, and the vegetation poorer
and more rushy, till it resembled on the whole, that of an English fen.
An Ipomœa or two, and a scarlet-flowered dwarf Heliconia kept up the
tropic type as does a stiff brittle fern about two feet high.
The plateau of pitch now widened out, and the whole ground looked
like an asphalt pavement, half overgrown with marsh-loving weeds,
whose roots feed in the sloppy water which overlies the pitch. But,
as yet, there was no sign of the lake. The incline, though gentle,
shuts off the view of what is beyond. This last lip of the lake has
surely overflowed, and is overflowing still, though very slowly. Its
furrows all curve downward; and, it is, in fact, as one of our party
said, “a black glacier.” The pitch, expanding under the burning sun
of day, must needs expand most towards the line of least resistance,
that is, down hill; and when it contracts again under the coolness of
night, it contracts surely from the same cause, more downhill than it
does uphill; so that each particle never returns to the spot whence
it started, but rather drags the particles above it downward towards
itself. At least, so it seemed to us.
At last we surmounted the last rise, and before us lay the famous
lake--not at the bottom of a depression, as we expected, but at the
top of a rise, whence the ground slopes away from it on two sides, and
rises from it very slightly on the two others. The black pool glared
and glittered in the sun. A group of islands, some twenty yards wide,
were scattered about the middle of it. Beyond it rose a noble forest
of Moriche fan-palms; and to the right of them high wood with giant
Mombins and undergrowth of Cocorite--a paradise on the other side of
the Stygian pool.
We walked, with some misgivings, on to the asphalt, and found it
perfectly hard. In a few yards we were stopped by a channel of clear
water, with tiny fish and water-beetles in it; and, looking round, saw
that the whole lake was intersected with channels, so unlike anything
which can be seen elsewhere, that it is not easy to describe them.
Conceive a crowd of mushrooms, of all shapes from ten to fifty feet
across, close together side by side, their tops being kept at exactly
the same level, their rounded rims squeezed tight against each other;
then conceive water poured on them so as to fill the parting seams, and
in the wet season, during which we visited it, to overflow the tops
somewhat. Thus would each mushroom represent, tolerably well, one of
the innumerable flat asphalt bosses, which seem to have sprung up each
from a separate centre.
In five minutes we had seen, handled, and smelt enough to satisfy us
with this very odd and very nasty vagary of tropic nature; and as we
did not wish to become faint or ill, between the sulphuretted hydrogen
and the blaze of the sun reflected off-the hot black pitch, we hurried
on over the water-furrows, and through the sedge-beds to the further
shore--to find ourselves in a single step out of an Inferno into a
Paradise.
We looked back at the foul place, and agreed that it is well for the
human mind that the Pitch Lake was still unknown when Dante wrote that
hideous poem of his--the opprobrium (as I hold) of the Middle Age. For
if such were the dreams of its noblest and purest genius, what must
have been the dreams of the ignoble and impure multitude? But had he
seen this lake, how easy, how tempting too, it would have been to him
to embody in imagery the surmise of a certain “Father,” and heighten
the torments of the lost being, sinking slowly into that black Bolge
beneath the baking rays of the tropic sun, by the sight of the saved,
walking where we walked, beneath cool fragrant shade, among the
pillars of a temple to which the Parthenon is mean and small.
Sixty feet and more aloft, the short, smooth columns of the Moriches
towered around us, till, as we looked through the “pillared shade,”
the eye was lost in the green abysses of the forest. Overhead, their
great fan-leaves form a grooved roof, compared with which that of St.
Mary Radcliff, or even of King’s College, is as clumsy as all man’s
works are beside the works of God; and beyond the Moriche wood, ostrich
plumes packed close round madder-brown stems, formed a wall to our
temple, which bore such tracery, carving, and painting, as would have
stricken dumb with awe and delight him who ornamented the Loggie of the
Vatican.
What might not have been made, with something of justice and mercy,
common sense and humanity, of these gentle Arawaks and Guaraons. What
was made of them, almost ere Columbus was dead, may be judged from this
one story, taken from Las Casas.
“There was a certain man named Juan Bono, who was employed by the
members of the Andencia of St. Domingo to go and obtain Indians. He
and his men to the number of fifty or sixty, landed on the Island of
Trinidad. Now the Indians of Trinidad were a mild, loving, credulous
race, the enemies of the Caribs, who ate human flesh. On Juan Bono’s
landing, the Indians armed with bows and arrows, went to meet the
Spaniards, and to ask them who they were, and what they wanted. Juan
Bono replied that his men were good and peaceful people, who had come
to live with the Indians; upon which, as the commencement of good
fellowship, the natives offered to build houses for the Spaniards. The
Spanish captain expressed a wish to have one large house built. The
accommodating Indians set about building it. It was to be in the form
of a bell and to be large enough for a hundred persons to live in.
On any great occasion it would hold many more.... Upon a certain day
Juan Bono collected the Indians together--men, women, and children--in
the building ‘to see,’ as he told them, ‘what was to be done.’... A
horrible massacre ensued....”