glory of the starlight has paled,--as I did this morning, following a
devious pathway between thickets of azalea, whose heavenly fragrance
perfumed the valley. Then, ascending a steep track through the
pine-forest, I reached a bald grey crag, commanding a glorious view of
the valley, and of some of the high peaks beyond. And thence I watched
the coming of the dawn.
A pale daffodil light crept upward, and the stars faded from heaven.
Then the great ghostly granite domes changed from deep purple to a
cold dead white, and the far-distant snow-capped peaks stood out in
a glittering light, while silvery-grey mists floated upward from the
canyons, as if awakening from their sleep. Here, just as in our own
Highlands, a faint chill breath of some cold current invariably heralds
the daybreak, and the tremulous leaves quiver, and whisper a greeting
to the dawn.
Suddenly a faint flush of rosy light just tinged the highest
snow-peaks, and, gradually stealing downward, overspread range beyond
range; another moment, and the granite domes and the great Rock
Sentinel alike blazed in the fiery glow, which deepened in colour till
all the higher crags seemed aflame, while the valley still lay shrouded
in purple gloom, and a great and solemn stillness brooded over all.
_Granite Crags_ (Edinburgh and London, 1884).
THE GOLDEN HORN
(_TURKEY_)
ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE
The land breeze begins to rise, and we make use of it to approach
nearer and nearer to the Dardanelles. Already several large ships,
which like us are trying to make this difficult entrance, come near us;
their large grey sails, like the wings of night-birds, glide silently
between our brig and Tenedos; I go down below and fall asleep.
Break of day: I hear the rapid sailing of vessels and the little
morning waves that sound around the sides of the brig like the song of
birds; I open the port-hole, and I see on a chain of low and rounded
hills the castles of the Dardanelles with their white walls, their
towers, and their immense mouths for the cannon; the canal is scarcely
more than a league in width at this place; it winds, like a beautiful
river, between the exactly similar coasts of Asia and Europe. The
castles shut in this sea just like the two wings of a door; but in the
present condition of Turkey and Europe, it would be easy to force a
passage by sea, or to make a landing and take the forts from the rear;
the passage of the Dardanelles is not impregnable unless guarded by the
Russians.
The rapid current carries us on like an arrow before Gallipoli and the
villages bordering the canal; we see the isles in the Sea of Marmora
frowning before us; we follow the coast of Europe for two days and
two nights, thwarted by the north winds. In the morning we perceive
perfectly the isles of the princes, in the Sea of Marmora, and the
Gulf of Nicæa, and on our left the castle of the Seven Towers, and the
aërial tops of the innumerable minarets of Stamboul, in front of the
seven hills of Constantinople. At each tack, we discover something new.
At the first view of Constantinople, I experienced a painful emotion of
surprise and disillusion. “What! is this,” I asked myself, “the sea,
the shore, and the marvellous city for which the masters of the world
abandoned Rome and the coast of Naples? Is this that capital of the
universe, seated upon Europe and Asia; for which all the conquering
nations disputed by turns as the sign of the supremacy of the world? Is
this the city that painters and poets imagine queen of cities seated
upon her hills and her twin seas; enclosed by her gulfs, her towers,
her mountains, and containing all the treasures of nature and the
luxury of the Orient?” It is here that one makes comparison with the
Bay of Naples bearing its white city upon its hollowed bosom like a
vast amphitheatre; with Vesuvius losing its golden brow in the clouds
of smoke and purple lights, the forest of Castellamare plunging its
black foliage into the blue sea, and the islands of Procida and Ischia
with their volcanic peaks yellow with vine-branches and white with
villas, shutting in the immense bay like gigantic moles thrown up by
God himself at the entrance of this port? I see nothing here to compare
to that spectacle with which my eyes are always enchanted; I am
sailing, it is true, upon a beautiful and lovely sea, but from the low
coasts, rounded and monotonous hills rear themselves; it is true that
the snows of Olympus of Thrace whiten the horizon, but they are only a
white cloud in the sky and do not make the landscape solemn enough. At
the back of the gulf I see nothing but the same rounded hills of the
same height without rocks, without coves, without indentations, and
Constantinople, which the pilot points out with his finger, is nothing
but a white and circumscribed city upon a large knoll on the European
coast. Is it worth while having come so far to be disenchanted? I did
not wish to look at it any longer; however, the ceaseless tackings of
the ship brought us sensibly nearer; we coasted along the castle of the
Seven Towers, an immense mediæval grey block, severe in construction,
which faces the sea at the angle of the Greek walls of the ancient
Byzantium, and we came to anchor beneath the houses of Stamboul in the
Sea of Marmora, in the midst of a host of ships and boats delayed like
ourselves from port by the violence of the north winds. It was five
o’clock, the sky was serene and the sun brilliant; I began to recover
from my disdain of Constantinople; the walls that enclosed this portion
of the city picturesquely built of the _débris_ of ancient walls and
surmounted by gardens, kiosks and little houses of wood painted red,
formed the foreground of the picture; above, the terraces of numerous
houses rose in pyramid-like tiers, story upon story, cut across with
the tops of orange-trees and the sharp, black spires of cypress;
higher still, seven or eight large mosques crowned the hill, and,
flanked by their open-work minarets and their mauresque colonnades,
lifted into the sky their gilded domes, flaming with the palpitating
sunlight; the walls, painted with tender blue, the leaden covers of
the cupolas that encircled them, gave them the appearance and the
transparent glaze of monuments of porcelain. The immemorial cypresses
lend to these domes their motionless and sombre peaks; and the various
tints of the painted houses of the city make the vast hill gay with
all the colours of a flower-garden. No noise issues from the streets;
no lattice of the innumerable windows opens; no movement disturbs
the habitation of such a great multitude of men: everything seems to
be sleeping under the broiling sunlight; the gulf, furrowed in every
direction with sails of all forms and sizes, alone gives signs of life.
Every moment we see vessels in full sail clear the Golden Horn (the
opening of the Bosphorus), the true harbour of Constantinople, passing
by us flying towards the Dardanelles; but we can not perceive the
entrance of the Bosphorus, nor even understand its position. We dine
on the deck opposite this magical spectacle; Turkish _caïques_ come to
question us and to bring us provisions and food; the boatmen tell us
that there is no longer any plague; I send my letters to the city; at
seven o’clock, M. Truqui, the consul-general of Sardaigne, accompanied
by officers of his legation, comes to pay us a visit and offer us the
hospitality of his house in Pera; there is not the slightest hope of
finding a lodging in the recently burned city; the obliging cordiality,
and the attraction that M. Truqui inspires at the first moment,
induces us to accept. The contrary wind still blows, and the brigs
cannot raise anchor this evening: we sleep on board.
[Illustration: THE GOLDEN HORN.]
At five o’clock I am standing on the deck; the captain lowers a boat; I
descend with him, and we set sail towards the mouth of the Bosphorus,
coasting along the walls of Constantinople, which the sea washes. After
half an hour’s navigation through a multitude of ships at anchor, we
reach the walls of the Seraglio, which stand next to those of the city,
and form, at the extremity of the hill that bears Stamboul, the angle
that separates the Sea of Marmora from the canal of the Bosphorus and
the Golden Horn, or the grand inner roadstead of Constantinople. It
is here that God and man, nature and art, have placed, or created,
in concert the most marvellous view that human eyes may contemplate
upon the earth. I gave an involuntary cry, and I forgot for ever the
Bay of Naples and all its enchantments; to compare anything to this
magnificent and gracious combination would be to insult creation.
The walls supporting the circular terraces of the immense gardens of
the great Seraglio were a few feet from us to our left, separated from
the sea by a narrow sidewalk of stone flags washed by the ceaseless
billows, where the perpetual current of the Bosphorus formed little
murmuring waves, as blue as those of the Rhône at Geneva; these
terraces that rise in gentle inclines up to the Sultan’s palace,
where you perceive the gilded domes across the gigantic tops of the
plantain-trees and the cypresses, are themselves planted with enormous
cypresses and plantains whose trunks dominate the walls and whose
boughs, spreading beyond the garden, hang over the sea in cascades of
foliage shadowing the _caïques_; the rowers stop from time to time
beneath their shade; every now and then these groups of trees are
interrupted by palaces, pavilions, kiosks, doors sculptured and gilded
opening upon the sea, or batteries of cannon of copper and bronze in
ancient and peculiar shapes.
Several pulls of the oar brought us to the precise point of the Golden
Horn where you enjoy at once a view of the Bosphorus, the Sea of
Marmora, and, finally, of the entire harbour, or, rather, the inland
sea of Constantinople; there we forgot Marmora, the coast of Asia, and
the Bosphorus, taking in with one glance the basin of the Golden Horn
and the seven cities seated upon the seven hills of Constantinople,
all converging towards the arm of the sea that forms the unique and
incomparable city, that is at the same time city, country, sea,
harbour, bank of flowers, gardens, wooded mountains, deep valleys,
an ocean of houses, a swarm of ships and streets, tranquil lakes,
and enchanted solitudes,--a view that no brush can render except by
details, and where each stroke of the oar gives the eye and soul
contradictory aspects and impressions.
We set sail towards the hills of Galata and Pera; the Seraglio receded
from us and grew larger in receding in proportion as the eye embraced
more and more the vast outlines of its walls and the multitude of
its roofs, its trees, its kiosks and its palaces. Of itself it is
sufficient to constitute a large city. The harbour hollows itself out
more and more before us; it winds like a canal between the flanks of
the curved mountains, and increases as we advance. The harbour does
not resemble a harbour in the least; it is rather a large river like
the Thames, enclosing the two coasts of the hills laden with towns,
and covered from one bank to the other with an interminable flotilla
of ships variously grouped the entire length of the houses. We pass by
this innumerable multitude of boats, some riding at anchor and some
about to set sail, sailing before the wind towards the Bosphorus,
towards the Black Sea, or towards the Sea of Marmora; boats of all
shapes and sizes and flags, from the Arabian barque, whose prow springs
and rises like the beak of antique galleys, to the vessel of three
decks with its glittering walls of bronze. Some flocks of Turkish
_caïques_, managed by one or two rowers in silken sleeves, little boats
that serve as carriages in the maritime streets of this amphibious
town, circulate between the large masses, cross and knock against each
other without overturning, and jostle one another like a crowd in
public places; and clouds of gulls, like beautiful white pigeons, rise
from the sea at their approach, to travel further away and be rocked
upon the waves. I did not try to count the vessels, the ships, the
brigs, the boats of all kinds and the barks that slept or travelled
in the harbour of Constantinople, from the mouth of the Bosphorus and
the point of the Seraglio to Eyoub and the delicious valleys of sweet
waters. The Thames at London offers nothing in comparison. It will
suffice to say that independently of the Turkish flotilla and the
European men-of-war at anchor in the centre of the canal, the two
sides of the Golden Horn are covered two or three vessels deep for
about a mile in length. We could only see the ocean by looking between
the file of prows and our glance lost itself at the back of the gulf
which contracted and ran into the shore amid a veritable forest of
masts.
I have just been strolling along the Asian shore on my return this
evening to Constantinople, and I find it a thousand times more
beautiful than the European shore. The Asian shore owes almost nothing
to man; everything here has been accomplished by nature. Here there is
no Buyukdere, no Therapia, no palace of ambassadors, and no town of
Armenians or Franks; there are only mountains, gorges that separate
them, little valleys carpeted with meadows that seem to dig themselves
out of the rocks, rivulets that wind about them, cascades that whiten
them with their foam, forests that hang to their flanks, glide into
their ravines, and descend to the very edges of the innumerable coast
gulfs; a variety of forms and tints, and of leafy verdure, which the
brush of a landscape-painter could not even hope to suggest. Some
isolated houses of sailors or Turkish gardeners are scattered at great
distances on the shore, or thrown on the foreground of a wooded hill,
or grouped upon the point of rocks where the current carries you,
and breaks into waves as blue as the night sky; some white sails of
fishermen, who creep along the deep coves, which you see glide from
one plane-tree to another, like linen that the washerwomen fold;
innumerable flights of white birds that dry themselves on the edge of
the meadows; eagles that hover among the heights of the mountains near
the sea; mysterious creeks entirely shut in between rocks and trunks of
gigantic trees, whose boughs, overcharged with leaves, bend over the
waves and form upon the sea cradles wherein the _caïques_ creep. One or
two villages hidden in the shadow of these creeks with their gardens
behind them on those green slopes, and their group of trees at the foot
of the rocks, with their barks rocked by the gentle waves before their
doors, their clouds of doves on the roofs, their women and children at
the windows, their old men seated beneath the plane-trees at the foot
of the minaret; labourers returning from the fields in their _caïques_;
others who have filled their barks with green faggots, myrtle, or
flowering heath to dry it for fuel in the winter; hidden behind these
heaps of slanting verdure that border and descend into the water, you
perceive neither the bark nor the rower, and you believe that a portion
of the bank detached from the earth by the current is floating at
haphazard on the sea with its green foliage and its perfumed flowers.
The shore presents this same appearance as far as the castle of Mahomet
II., which from this coast also seems to shut in the Bosphorus like a
Swiss lake; there, it changes its character; the hills, less rugged,
sink their flanks and more gently hollow into narrow valleys; the
Asiatic villages extend more richly and nearer together; the Sweet
Waters of Asia, a charming little plain shadowed by trees and sown with
kiosks and Moorish fountains opens out to the vision.
Beyond the palace of Beglierby, the Asian coast again becomes wooded
and solitary as far as Scutari, which is as brilliant as a garden
of roses, at the extremity of a cape at the entrance of the Sea of
Marmora. Opposite, the verdant point of the Seraglio presents itself
to the eye; and between the European coast, crowned with its three
painted towns, and the coast of Stamboul, all glittering with its
cupolas and minarets, opens the immense port of Constantinople, where
the ships anchored at the two banks leave only one large water-way
for the _caïques_. I glide through this labyrinth of buildings, as
in a Venetian gondola under the shadow of palaces, and I land at the
_échelle des Morts_, under an avenue of cypresses.
_Voyage en Orient_ (Paris, 1843).
THE YELLOWSTONE[13]
(_UNITED STATES_)
RUDYARD KIPLING
“That desolate land and lone
Where the Big Horn and Yellowstone
Roar down their mountain path.”
Twice have I written this letter from end to end. Twice have I torn it
up, fearing lest those across the water should say that I had gone mad
on a sudden. Now we will begin for the third time quite solemnly and
soberly. I have been through the Yellowstone National Park in a buggy,
in the company of an adventurous old lady from Chicago and her husband,
who disapproved of scenery as being “ongodly.” I fancy it scared them.
[Illustration: COATING SPRINGS, YELLOWSTONE.]
We began, as you know, with the Mammoth Hot Springs. They are only
a gigantic edition of those pink and white terraces not long ago
destroyed by earthquake in New Zealand. At one end of the little valley
in which the hotel stands the lime-laden springs that break from
the pine-covered hillsides have formed a frozen cataract of white,
lemon, and palest pink formations, through and over and in which
water of the warmest bubbles and drips and trickles from pale-green
lagoon to exquisitely fretted basin. The ground rings hollow as a
kerosene-tin, and some day the Mammoth Hotel, guests and all, will sink
into the caverns below and be turned into a stalactite. When I set
foot on the first of the terraces, a tourist-trampled ramp of scabby
grey stuff, I met a steam of iron-red hot water, which ducked into a
hole like a rabbit. Followed a gentle chuckle of laughter, and then
a deep, exhausted sigh from nowhere in particular. Fifty feet above
my head a jet of steam rose up and died out in the blue. It was worse
than the boiling mountain at Myanoshita. The dirty white deposit gave
place to lime whiter than snow; and I found a basin which some learned
hotel-keeper has christened Cleopatra’s pitcher, or Mark Antony’s
whisky-jug, or something equally poetical. It was made of frosted
silver; it was filled with water as clear as the sky. I do not know the
depth of that wonder. The eye looked down beyond grottoes and caves of
beryl into an abyss that communicated directly with the central fires
of earth. And the pool was in pain, so that it could not refrain from
talking about it; muttering and chattering and moaning. From the lips
of the lime-ledges, forty feet under water, spurts of silver bubbles
would fly up and break the peace of the crystal atop. Then the whole
pool would shake and grow dim, and there were noises. I removed myself
only to find other pools all equally unhappy, rifts in the ground, full
of running red-hot water, slippery sheets of deposit overlaid with
greenish grey hot water, and here and there pit-holes dry as a rifled
tomb in India, dusty and waterless. Elsewhere the infernal waters had
first boiled dead and then embalmed the palms and underwood, or the
forest trees had taken heart and smothered up a blind formation with
greenery, so that it was only by scraping the earth you could tell what
fires had raged beneath. Yet the pines will win the battle in years
to come, because Nature, who first forges all her work in her great
smithies, has nearly finished this job, and is ready to temper it in
the soft brown earth. The fires are dying down; the hotel is built
where terraces have overflowed into flat wastes of deposit; the pines
have taken possession of the high ground whence the terraces first
started. Only the actual curve of the cataract stands clear, and it is
guarded by soldiers who patrol it with loaded six-shooters, in order
that the tourist may not bring up fence-rails and sink them in a pool,
or chip the fretted tracery of the formations with a geological hammer,
or, walking where the crust is too thin, foolishly cook himself....
Next dawning, entering a buggy of fragile construction, with the
old people from Chicago, I embarked on my perilous career. We ran
straight up a mountain till we could see sixty miles away, the white
houses of Cook City on another mountain, and the whiplash-like trail
leading thereto. The live air made me drunk. If Tom, the driver, had
proposed to send the mares in a bee-line to the city, I should have
assented, and so would the old lady, who chewed gum and talked about
her symptoms. The tub-ended rock-dog, which is but the translated
prairie-dog, broke across the road under our horses’ feet, the rabbit
and the chipmunk danced with fright; we heard the roar of the river,
and the road went round a corner. On one side piled rock and shale,
that enjoined silence for fear of a general slide-down; on the other
a sheer drop, and a fool of a noisy river below. Then, apparently
in the middle of the road, lest any should find driving too easy, a
post of rock. Nothing beyond that save the flank of a cliff. Then my
stomach departed from me, as it does when you swing, for we left the
dirt, which was at least some guarantee of safety, and sailed out round
the curve, and up a steep incline, on a plank-road built out from the
cliff. The planks were nailed at the outer edge, and did not shift
or creak very much--but enough, quite enough. That was the Golden
Gate. I got my stomach back again when we trotted out on to a vast
upland adorned with a lake and hills. Have you ever seen an untouched
land--the face of virgin Nature? It is rather a curious sight, because
the hills are choked with timber that has never known an axe, and the
storm has rent a way through this timber, so that a hundred thousand
trees lie matted together in swathes; and since each tree lies where it
falls, you may behold trunk and branch returning to the earth whence
they sprang--exactly as the body of man returns--each limb making its
own little grave, the grass climbing above the bark, till at last there
remains only the outline of a tree upon the rank undergrowth.
Then we drove under a cliff of obsidian, which is black glass, some two
hundred feet high; and the road at its foot was made of black glass
that crackled. This was no great matter, because half an hour before
Tom had pulled up in the woods that we might sufficiently admire a
mountain who stood all by himself, shaking with laughter or rage....
Then by companies after tiffin we walked chattering to the uplands of
Hell. They call it the Norris Geyser Basin on Earth. It was as though
the tide of dissolution had gone out, but would presently return,
across innumerable acres of dazzling white geyser formation. There
were no terraces here, but all other horrors. Not ten yards from the
road a blast of steam shot up roaring every few seconds, a mud volcano
spat filth to Heaven, streams of hot water rumbled under foot, plunged
through the dead pines in steaming cataracts and died on a waste of
white where green-grey, black-yellow, and link pools roared, shouted,
bubbled, or hissed as their wicked fancies prompted. By the look of the
eye the place should have been frozen over. By the feel of the feet it
was warm. I ventured out among the pools, carefully following tracks,
but one unwary foot began to sink, a squirt of water followed, and
having no desire to descend quick into Tophet I returned to the shore
where the mud and the sulphur and the nameless fat ooze-vegetation of
Lethe lay. But the very road rang as though built over a gulf; and
besides how was I to tell when the raving blast of steam would find
its vent insufficient and blow the whole affair into Nirvana? There
was a potent stench of stale eggs everywhere, and crystals of sulphur
crumbled under the foot, and the glare of the sun on the white stuff
was blinding....