swung their hammocks to the stems of these Moriches, spinning the skin
of the young leaves into twine, and making sago from the pith, and then
wine from the sap and fruit, while they warned their children not to
touch the nests of the humming-birds, which even till lately swarmed
around the lake. For--so the Indian story ran--once on a time a tribe
of Chaymas built their palm-leaf ajoupas upon the very spot, where the
lake now lies, and lived a merry life. The sea swarmed with shell-fish
and turtle, and the land with pine-apples; the springs were haunted by
countless flocks of flamingoes and horned screamers, pajuis and blue
ramiers; and, above all, by humming-birds. But the foolish Chaymas
were blind to the mystery and beauty of the humming-birds, and would
not understand how they were no other than the souls of dead Indians,
translated into living jewels; and so they killed them in wantonness,
and angered “The Good Spirit.” But one morning, when the Guaraons came
by, the Chayma village had sunk deep into the earth, and in its place
had risen this Lake of Pitch. So runs the tale, told forty years since
to Mr. Joseph, author of a clever little history of Trinidad, by an old
half-caste Indian, Señor Trinidada by name, who was said then to be
nigh one hundred years of age. Surely the people among whom such a myth
could spring up, were worthy of a nobler fate.
_At Last_ (London and New York, 1871).
THE LACHINE RAPIDS
(_CANADA_)
DOUGLAS SLADEN
From St. Anne’s to Lachine is not such a very far cry, and it was
at Lachine that the great La Salle had his first seigniory. This
Norman founder of Illinois, who reared on the precipices of Fort St.
Louis the white flag and his great white cross nearly a couple of
centuries before the beginnings of the Metropolis of the West, made his
beginnings at his little seigniory round Fort Remy, on the Island of
Montreal.
The son of a wealthy and powerful burgher of Rouen, he had been brought
up to become a Jesuit. La Salle was well fitted for an ecclesiastic,
a prince of the Church, a Richelieu, but not for a Jesuit, whose
effacement of self is the keystone of the order. To be one step, one
stone in the mighty pyramid of the Order of Jesus was not for him, a
man of mighty individuality like Columbus or Cromwell, and accordingly
his piety, asceticism, vast ambition, and superhuman courage were lost
to the Church and gained to the State. So says Parkman....
[Illustration: THE LACHINE RAPIDS.]
His seigniory and fort--probably the Fort Remy of which a contemporary
plan has come down to us--were just where the St. Lawrence begins to
widen into Lake St. Louis, abreast of the famous Rapids of Lachine,
shot by so many tourists with blanched cheeks every summer. I say
tourists, for, as I have said before, there is nothing your true
Canadian loves so much as the off-chance of being drowned in a cataract
or “splifficated” on a toboggan slide. It is part of the national
education, like the Bora Bora, or teeth-drawing, of the Australian
aborigines. The very name Lachine breathes a memory of La Salle, for it
was so christened in scorn by his detractors--the way by which La Salle
thinks he is going to get to China. A palisade containing, at any rate,
the house of La Salle, a stone mill still standing, and a stone barrack
and ammunition house, now falling into most picturesque and pitfallish
decay--such is Fort Remy, founded nearly two centuries and a quarter
ago, when England was just beginning to feel the invigorating effects
of a return to the blessings of Stuart rule. This was in 1667, but La
Salle was not destined to remain here long. In two years’ time he had
learned seven or eight Indian languages, and felt himself ready for the
ambition of his life: to find his way to the Vermilion Sea--the Gulf
of California--for a short cut to the wealth of China and Japan,--an
ambition which resolved itself into founding a province or Colonial
Empire for France at the mouth of the Mississippi, when he discovered
later on that the Mississippi flowed into the Gulf of Mexico and not
into the Gulf of California.
We cannot follow him in his long connection with the Illinois Indians
and Fort St. Louis. We must leave him gazing from the walls of his
seigniory across the broad bosom of Lake St. Louis at the forests
of Beauharnais and Chateauguay (destined afterwards to be Canada’s
Thermopylæ) and the sunset, behind which must be a new passage to the
South Seas and the treasures of Cathay and Cipango--the dream which
had fired the brain of every discoverer from Columbus and Vasco Nuñez
downwards.
Nowadays Lachine suggests principally the canal by which the rapids are
avoided, the rapids themselves, and the superb Canadian Pacific Railway
Bridge, which is a link in the realization of La Salle’s vast idea.
Hard by, too, the St. Lawrence opens out into the expanse of Lake St.
Louis, dear to Montreallers in the glowing Canadian summer. Seen from
the bank, the rapids are most disappointing to people who expect them
to look like Niagara. Seen from the deck of the steamer which runs in
connection with the morning and evening train from Montreal, they make
the blood of the novice creep, though the safety of the trip is evinced
by the fact that it is no longer considered necessary to take a pilot
from the neighbouring Indian village of Caughnawaga. It is said that,
if the steamer is abandoned to the current, it is impossible for her to
strike, the scour being so strong; certainly, her engines are slowed;
she reels about like a drunken man; right and left you see fierce green
breakers with hissing white fillets threatening to swamp you at every
minute. Every second thud of these waves upon the sides convinces you
that the ship is aground and about to be dashed to pieces. There seems
absolutely no chance of getting safely out of the boiling waters, which
often rush together like a couple of fountains. Yet, after a few trips,
you know that the Captain is quite justified in sitting in his easy
chair and smoking a cigarette all through it. It is admirably described
in brief by Dawson: “As the steamer enters the long and turbulent
rapids of the Sault St. Louis, the river is contracted and obstructed
by islands; and trap dykes, crossing the softer limestone rocks, make,
by their uneven wear, a very broken bottom. The fall of the river is
also considerable, and the channel tortuous, all which circumstances
combined cause this rapid to be more feared than any of the others.
“As the steamer enters the rapids the engines are slowed, retaining
a sufficient speed to give steerage way, and, rushing along with the
added speed of the swift current, the boat soon begins to labour among
the breakers and eddies. The passengers grow excited at the apparently
narrow escapes, as the steamer seems almost to touch rock after rock,
and dips her prow into the eddies, while the turbulent waters throw
their spray over the deck.”
_On the Cars and Off_ (London, New York and Melbourne, 1895).
LAKE ROTORUA
(_NEW ZEALAND_)
H. R. HAWEIS
The thermæ, or hot baths, of the near future are without doubt the
marvellous volcanic springs of Rotorua and the Lake Taupo district, in
the North Island. They can now be reached from London, _via_ Francisco,
in thirty-three days. They concentrate in a small area all the varied
qualities of the European springs, and other curative properties of an
extraordinary character, which are not possessed in the same degree
by any other known waters. Before Mr. Froude’s _Oceana_, and the
subsequent destruction of the famous pink terraces, little attention
had been called to one of the most romantic and amazing spectacles in
the world. The old terraces are indeed gone. The idyllic villages, the
blossoming slopes are a waste of volcanic ashes and scoriæ through
which the dauntless vegetation is only now beginning to struggle. The
blue waters are displaced and muddy, but the disaster of one shock
could not rob the land of its extraordinary mystery and beauty. For
a distance of three hundred miles, south of Lake Taupo and running
north, a volcanic crust, sometimes thin enough to be trodden through,
separates the foot from a seething mass of sulphur, gas, and boiling
water, which around Rotorua and Waikari finds strange and ample vents,
in hot streams, clouds of vapour, warm lakes, geysers, occasionally
developing into appalling volcanic outbursts, which certainly
invest this region with a weird terror, but also with an inconceivable
charm, as white vapour breaks amidst flowering bushes, in the midst of
true valleys of paradise; the streams ripple hot and crystalline over
parti-coloured rocks or through emerald-hued mossy dells; the warm
lakes sleep embedded in soft, weedy banks, reflecting huge boulders,
half clothed in tropical foliage; coral-like deposits here and there of
various tints reproduce the famous terraces in miniature; and geysers,
in odd moments, spout huge volumes of boiling water with an unearthly
roar eighty feet into the air. At Waikari, near Lake Taupo, specimens
of all these wonders are concentrated in a few square miles--the
bubbling white mud pools, like foaming plaster of Paris, the petrifying
springs, into which a boy fell some time ago, and getting a good
silicate coat over him was taken out months afterwards “as good as
ever,” so my guide explained.
[Illustration: LAKE ROTORUA.]
“What,” I said, “did he not feel even a little poorly?”
“What’s that?” said the guide, and the joke dawning on him burst into a
tardy roar.
And time would fail me to tell of the dragon’s mouth, and open rock
vomiting sulphur and steam; the lightning pool, in whose depths for
ever flash queer opaline subaqueous flashes; the champagne pool, the
Prince of Wales’s Feathers, a geyser which can be made to play half an
hour after a few clods of mud have blocked up a little hot stream; the
steam hammer, the fairy bath, the donkey engine, etc.
At Rotorua we bought blocks of soap and threw them in to make a certain
big geyser spout. The Maoris have still the monopoly there; you pay
toll, cross a rickety bridge with a Maori girl as guide, and then visit
the pools, terraces, and boiling fountains. They are not nearly so
picturesque as at Waikari, which is a wilderness of blossoming glens,
streams, and wooded vales. But you see the Maori in his native village.
The volcanic crust is warm to the feet; the Maori huts of “toitoi”
reeds and boards are all about; outside are warm pools; naked boys and
girls are swimming in them; as we approach they emerge half out of the
water; we throw them threepenny bits. The girls seem most eager and
dive best--one cunning little girl about twelve or thirteen, I believe,
caught her coin each time under water long before it sank, but throwing
up her legs half out of water dived deep, pretending to fetch it up
from the bottom. Sometimes there was a scramble under water for the
coin; the girls generally got it; the boys seemed half lazy. We passed
on.
“Here is the brain pot,” said our Maori belle; a hollowed stone. It
was heated naturally--the brains cooked very well there in the old
days--not very old days either.
“Here is the bread oven.” She drew off the cloth, and sure enough in
a hole in the hot ground there were three new loaves getting nicely
browned. “Here are potatoes,” and she pointed to a little boiling pool,
and the potatoes were nearly done; and “here is meat,”--a tin let
into the earth, that was all, contained a joint baking; and farther
on was a very good stew--at least, it being one o’clock, it smelt
well enough. And so there is no fuel and no fire wanted in this and
dozens of other Maori pahs or hamlets. In the cold nights the Maoris
come out of their tents naked, and sit or even sleep in the hot
shallow lakelets and pools hard by. Anything more uncanny than this
walk through the Rotorua Geyser village can hardly be conceived. The
best springs are rented from the Maoris by the Government, or local
hotel-keepers. These are now increasingly fashionable bathing resorts.
The finest bath specific for rheumatism is the Rachel bath, investing
the body with a soft, satiny texture, and a pearly complexion; the
iron, sulphur, and especially the oil bath, from which when you emerge
you have but to shake yourself dry. But the Priest’s bath, so called
from the discoverer, Father Mahoney--who cured himself of obstinate
rheumatism--is perhaps of all the most miraculous in its effects,
and there are no two opinions about it. Here take place the most
incredible cures of sciatica, gout, lumbago, and all sorts of rheumatic
affections. It is simply a question of fact.
The Countess of Glasgow herself told me about the cure of a certain
colonel relative or aide-de-camp of the Governor, the Earl of Glasgow.
The Colonel had for years been a perfect martyr to rheumatism and
gout. He went to Rotorua with his swollen legs and feet, and came away
wearing tight boots, and “as good as ever,” as my guide would have
said. But indeed I heard of scores of similar cases. Let all victims
who can afford it lay it well to heart. A pleasure trip, of only
thirty-two days, changing saloon rail carriage but three times, and
steamer cabins but twice, will insure them an almost infallible cure,
even when chronically diseased and no longer young. This is no “jeujah”
affair. I have seen and spoken to the fortunate _beneficiares_--you
meet them all over New Zealand. Of course, the fame of the baths is
spreading: the region is only just made accessible by the opening of
the railway from Auckland to Rotorua--a ten hours’ run. The Waikari
and Taupo baths are very similar, and the situation is infinitely more
romantic, but the Government, on account of the railway, are pushing
the Rotorua baths.
I stole out about half-past ten at night; it was clear and frosty.
I made my way to a warm lake at the bottom of the hotel grounds, a
little shed and a tallow candle being the only accommodation provided.
Anything more weird than that starlight bath I never experienced. I
stepped in the deep night from the frosty bank into a temperature of
about 80°.
It was a large shallow lake. I peered into the dark, but I could not
see its extent by the dim starlight; no, not even the opposite banks.
I swam about until I came to the margin--a mossy, soft margin. Dark
branches of trees dipped in the water, and I could feel the fallen
leaves floating about. I followed the margin round till the light in my
wood cabin dwindled to a mere spark in the distance, then I swam out
into the middle of the lake. When I was upright the warm water reached
my chin; beneath my feet seemed to be fine sand and gravel. Then
leaning my head back I looked up at the Milky Way, and all the expanse
of the starlit heavens. There was not a sound; the great suns and
planets hung like golden balls above me in the clear air. The star dust
of planetary systems--whole universes--stretched away bewilderingly
into the unutterable void of boundless immensity, mapping out here and
there the trackless thoroughfares of God in the midnight skies. “_Dont
la poussière_,” as Lamartine finely writes in oft-plagiarised words,
“_sont les Étoiles qui remontent et tombent devant Lui_.”
How long I remained there absorbed in this super-mundane contemplation
I cannot say. I felt myself embraced simultaneously by three
elements--the warm water, the darkness, and the starlit air. They wove
a threefold spell about my senses, whilst my intellect seemed detached,
free. Emancipated from earthly trammels, I seemed mounting up and up
towards the stars. Suddenly I found myself growing faint, luxuriously
faint. My head sank back, my eyes closed, there was a humming as of
some distant waterfall in my ears. I seemed falling asleep, pillowed on
the warm water, but common sense rescued me just in time. I was alone
in an unknown hot lake in New Zealand at night, out of reach of human
call. I roused myself with a great effort of will. I had only just
time to make for the bank when I grew quite dizzy. The keen frosty air
brought me unpleasantly to my senses. My tallow dip was guttering in
its socket, and hastily resuming my garments, in a somewhat shivering
condition, I retraced the rocky path, then groped my way over the
little bridge under which rushed the hot stream that fed the lakelet,
and guided only by the dim starlight I regained my hotel.
I had often looked up at the midnight skies before--at Charles’s
Wain and the Pleiades on the Atlantic, at the Southern Cross on the
Pacific, and the resplendent Milky Way in the Tropics, at Mars and his
so-called canals, at “the opal widths of the moon” from the snowy top
of Mount Cenis, but never, no, never had I studied astronomy under
such extraordinary circumstances and with such peculiar and enchanted
environments as on this night at the Waikari hot springs.
_Travel and Talk_ (London and New York, 1896).
THE BIG TREES OF CALIFORNIA
(_UNITED STATES_)
C. F. GORDON-CUMMING
At last we entered the true forest-belt, and anything more beautiful
you cannot conceive. We forgot our bumps and bruises in sheer delight.
Oh the loveliness of those pines and cedars, living or dead! For the
dead trees are draped with the most exquisite golden-green lichen,
which hangs in festoons many yards in length, and is unlike any other
moss or lichen I ever saw. I can compare it to nothing but gleams of
sunshine in the dark forest. Then, too, how beautiful are the long
arcades of stately columns, red, yellow, or brown, 200 feet in height,
and straight as an arrow, losing themselves in their own crown of
misty green foliage; and some standing solitary, dead and sunbleached,
telling of careless fires, which burnt away their hearts, but could not
make them fall!
There are so many different pines and firs, and cedars, that as yet I
can scarcely tell one from another. The whole air is scented with the
breath of the forests--the aromatic fragrance of resin and of dried
cones and pine-needles baked by the hot sun (how it reminds me of
Scotch firs!); and the atmosphere is clear and crystalline--a medium
which softens nothing, and reveals the farthest distance in sharpest
detail. Here and there we crossed deep gulches, where streams (swollen
to torrents by the melting snow on the upper hills) rushed down over
great boulders and prostrate trees and the victims of the winter gales.
Then we came to quiet glades in the forest, where the soft lawn-like
turf was all jewelled with flowers; and the sunlight trickled through
the dripping boughs of the feathery Douglas pines, and the jolly little
chip-munks played hide-and-seek among the great cedars, and chased
one another to the very tops of the tall pitch-pines, which stand
like clusters of dark spires, more than 200 feet in height. It was
altogether lovely; but I think no one was sorry when we reached a turn
in the road, where we descended from the high forest-belt, and crossing
a picturesque stream--“Big Creek”--by name--we found ourselves in this
comfortable ranch, which takes its name from one of the pioneers of the
valley.
We have spent a long day of delight in the most magnificent forest
that it is possible to imagine; and I have realized an altogether
new sensation, for I have seen the Big Trees of California, and have
walked round about them, and inside their cavernous hollows, and
have done homage as beseems a most reverent tree-worshipper. They
are wonderful--they are stupendous! But as to beauty--no. They shall
never tempt me to swerve from my allegiance to my true tree-love--the
glorious Deodara forest of the Himalayas.
[Illustration: THE BIG TREES OF CALIFORNIA.]
If size alone were to be considered, undoubtedly the Sequoia stands
preëminent, for-to-day we have seen several trees at least three times
as large as the biggest Deodara in the cedar shades of Kunai;
but for symmetry, and grace, and exquisitely harmonious lines, the
“God-given” cedar of Himala stands alone, with its wide spreading,
twisted arms, and velvety layers of foliage studded with pale-green
cones,--its great red stem supporting a pyramid of green, far more
majestic than the diminutive crown of the Big Trees. So at first it was
hard to realize that the California cedars are altogether justified in
concentrating all their growing power in one steady upward direction,
so intent on reaching heaven that they could not afford to throw out
one kindly bough to right or left. They remind me of certain rigidly
good Pharisees, devoid of all loving sympathies with their fellows,
with no outstretched arms of kindly charity--only intent on regulating
their own lives by strictest unvarying rule.
Great Towers of Babel they seem to me, straining upward towards the
heaven which they will never reach.
There is nothing lovable about a Sequoia. It is so gigantic that I feel
overawed by it, but all the time I am conscious that I am comparing it
with the odd Dutch trees in a Noah’s Ark, with a small tuft of foliage
on the top of a large red stem, all out of proportion. And another
unpleasant simile forces itself on my mind--namely, a tall penguin, or
one of the wingless birds of New Zealand, with feeble little flaps in
place of wings, altogether disproportioned to their bodies.
But this is merely an aside--lest you should suppose that each new land
I visit wins my affections from earlier loves. The Deodara forests must
ever keep their place in my innermost heart: no sunlight can ever be
so lovely as that which plays among their boughs--no sky so blue--no
ice-peaks so glittering as those which there cleave the heaven; and
I am sure that these poor wretched-looking Digger Indians can never
have the same interest for me as the wild Himalayan highlanders--the
Paharis--who assemble at the little temples of carved cedar-wood in the
Great Forest Sanctuary, to offer their strange sacrifices, and dance in
mystic sunwise procession.
Having said this much, I may now sing the praises of a newly found
delight, for in truth these forests of the Sierras have a charm of
their own, which cannot be surpassed, in the amazing variety of
beautiful pines, firs, and cedars of which they are composed. The
white fir, the Douglas spruce, sugar-pine, and pitch-pine are the most
abundant, and are scattered singly or in singularly picturesque groups
over all the mountains hereabouts.
But the Big Trees are only found in certain favoured spots--sheltered
places watered by snow-fed streams, at an average of from 5,000 to
7,000 feet above the sea. Eight distinct groves have been discovered,
all growing in rich, deep, vegetable mould, on a foundation of
powdered granite. Broad gaps lie between the principal groves, and
it is observed that these invariably lie in the track of the great
ice-rivers, where the accumulation of powdered rock and gravel formed
the earliest commencement of the soil, which by slow degrees became
rich, and deep, and fertile. There is even reason to believe that these
groves are pre-Adamite. A very average tree (only twenty-three feet in
diameter) having been felled, its annual rings were counted by three
different persons, whose calculations varied from 2,125 to 2,137; and
this tree was by no means very aged-looking--probably not half the
age of some of its big relations, one of which (on King’s river) is
forty-four feet in diameter.
Then, again, some of the largest of these trees are lying prostrate
on the ground; and in the ditches formed by their crash, trees have
grown up of such a size, and in such a position, as to prove that
the fallen giants have lain there for centuries--a thousand years or
more; and although partially embedded in the earth, and surrounded by
damp forest, their almost imperishable timber is as sound as if newly
felled. So it appears that a Sequoia may lie on damp earth for untold
ages without showing any symptom of decay. Yet in the southern groves
huge prostrate trees are found quite rotten, apparently proving that
they must have lain there for an incalculable period.
Of the eight groves aforesaid, the most northerly is Calaveras, and the
most southerly is on the south fork of the Tule river. The others are
the Stanislaus, the Merced and Crane Flat, the Mariposa, the Fresno,
the King’s and Kaweah rivers, and the north fork of the Tule river.
It is worthy of note that the more northerly groves are found at the
lowest level, Calaveras being only 4,759 feet above the sea, while the
Tule and Kaweah belts range over the Sierras at about 7,000 feet.
The number of Sequoias in the northern groves is reckoned to be as
follows: Calaveras, ninety trees upwards of fifteen feet in diameter;
Stanislaus, or South Calaveras grove, distant six miles from North
Calaveras, contains 1,380 trees over one foot in diameter (many of them
being over thirty feet in diameter). Mariposa has its 600 Sequoias; and
the beautiful Fresno grove, some miles from Mariposa, has 1,200. Merced
has fifty, and Tuolumne thirty. The southern belts have not yet been
fully explored, but are apparently the most extensive.
The Mariposa grove, where we have been to-day, is the only one which
has been reserved by Government as a park for the nation. It lies five
miles from here. I should rather say there are two groves. The lower
grove lies in a sheltered valley between two mountain-spurs; the upper
grove, as its name implies, occupies a higher level, 6,500 feet above
the sea.