serpentining between the tree-boles, the wheels running silent on
immemorial mould. There was nothing alive in the forest save ourselves.
Only a river was speaking angrily somewhere to the right. For miles we
drove till Tom bade us alight and look at certain falls. Wherefore we
stepped out of that forest and nearly fell down a cliff which guarded a
tumbled river and returned demanding fresh miracles. If the water had
run uphill, we should perhaps have taken more notice of it; but ’twas
only a waterfall, and I really forget whether the water was warm or
cold. There is a stream here called Firehole River. It is fed by the
overflow from the various geysers and basins,--a warm and deadly river
wherein no fish breed. I think we crossed it a few dozen times in the
course of the day.
Then the sun began to sink, and there was a taste of frost about, and
we went swiftly from the forest into the open, dashed across a branch
of the Firehole River and found a wood shanty, even rougher than the
last, at which, after a forty mile drive, we were to dine and sleep.
Half a mile from this place stood, on the banks of the Firehole River
a “beaver-lodge,” and there were rumours of bears and other cheerful
monsters in the woods on the hill at the back of the building....
Once upon a time there was a carter who brought his team and a friend
into the Yellowstone Park without due thought. Presently they came upon
a few of the natural beauties of the place, and that carter turned his
friend’s team, howling: “Get back o’ this, Tim. All Hell’s alight under
our noses.” And they call the place Hell’s Half-acre to this day. We,
too, the old lady from Chicago, her husband, Tom, and the good little
mares came to Hell’s Half-acre, which is about sixty acres, and when
Tom said: “Would you like to drive over it?” we said: “Certainly no,
and if you do, we shall report you to the authorities.” There was a
plain, blistered and puled and abominable, and it was given over to
the sportings and spoutings of devils who threw mud and steam and dirt
at each other with whoops and halloos and bellowing curses. The place
smelt of the refuse of the Pit, and that odour mixed with the clean,
wholesome aroma of the pines in our nostrils throughout the day. Be
it known that the Park is laid out, like Ollendorf, in exercises of
progressive difficulty. Hell’s Half-acre was a prelude to ten or twelve
miles of geyser formation. We passed hot streams boiling in the forest;
saw whiffs of steam beyond these, and yet other whiffs breaking through
the misty green hills in the far distance; we trampled on sulphur, and
sniffed things much worse than any sulphur which is known to the upper
world; and so came upon a park-like place where Tom suggested we should
get out and play with the geysers.
Imagine mighty green fields splattered with lime beds: all the flowers
of the summer growing up to the very edge of the lime. That was the
first glimpse of the geyser basins. The buggy had pulled up close to
a rough, broken, blistered cone of stuff between ten and twenty feet
high. There was trouble in that place--moaning, splashing, gurgling,
and the clank of machinery. A spurt of boiling water jumped into the
air and a wash of water followed. I removed swiftly. The old lady from
Chicago shrieked. “What a wicked waste!” said her husband. I think
they call it the Riverside Geyser. Its spout was torn and ragged like
the mouth of a gun when a shell has burst there. It grumbled madly for
a moment or two and then was still. I crept over the steaming lime--it
was the burning marl on which Satan lay--and looked fearfully down its
mouth. You should never look a gift geyser in the mouth. I beheld a
horrible slippery, slimy funnel with water rising and falling ten feet
at a time. Then the water rose to lip level with a rush and an infernal
bubbling troubled this Devil’s Bethesda before the sullen heave of the
crest of a wave lapped over the edge and made me run. Mark the nature
of the human soul! I had begun with awe, not to say terror. I stepped
back from the flanks of the Riverside Geyser saying: “Pooh! Is that all
it can do?” Yet for aught I knew the whole thing might have blown up at
a minute’s notice; she, he, or it, being an arrangement of uncertain
temper.
We drifted on up that miraculous valley. On either side of us were
hills from a thousand to fifteen feet high and wooded from heel to
crest. As far as the eye could range forward were columns of steam in
the air, misshapen lumps of lime, most like preadamite monsters, still
pools of turquoise blue, stretches of blue cornflowers, a river that
coiled on itself twenty times, boulders of strange colours, and ridges
of glaring, staring white.
The old lady from Chicago poked with her parasol at the pools as though
they had been alive. On one particularly innocent-looking little
puddle she turned her back for a moment, and there rose behind her a
twenty-foot column of water and steam. Then she shrieked and protested
that “she never thought it would ha’ done it,” and the old man chewed
his tobacco steadily, and mourned for steam power wasted. I embraced
the whitened stump of a middle-sized pine that had grown all too close
to a hot pool’s lip, and the whole thing turned over under my hand as a
tree would do in a nightmare. From right and left came the trumpetings
of elephants at play. I stepped into a pool of old dried blood rimmed
with the nodding cornflowers; the blood changed to ink even as I trod;
and ink and blood were washed away in a spurt of boiling sulphurous
water spat out from the lee of a bank of flowers. This sounds mad,
doesn’t it?...
We rounded a low spur of hills, and came out upon a field of aching
snowy lime, rolled in sheets, twisted into knots, riven with rents
and diamonds and stars, stretching for more than half a mile in every
direction. In this place of despair lay most of the big geysers who
know when there is trouble in Krakatoa, who tell the pines when
there is a cyclone on the Atlantic seaboard, and who--are exhibited
to visitors under pretty and fanciful names. The first mound that I
encountered belonged to a goblin splashing in his tub. I heard him
kick, pull a shower-bath on his shoulders, gasp, crack his joints, and
rub himself down with a towel; then he let the water out of the bath,
as a thoughtful man should, and it all sank down out of sight till
another goblin arrived. Yet they called this place the Lioness and the
Cubs. It lies not very far from the Lion, which is a sullen, roaring
beast, and they say that when it is very active the other geysers
presently follow suit. After the Krakatoa eruption all the geysers went
mad together, spouting, spurting, and bellowing till men feared that
they would rip up the whole field. Mysterious sympathies exist among
them, and when the Giantess speaks (of her more anon) they all hold
their peace.
I was watching a solitary spring, when, far across the fields, stood up
a plume of spun glass, iridescent and superb against the sky. “That,”
said the trooper, “is Old Faithful. He goes off every sixty-five
minutes to the minute, plays for five minutes, and sends up a column of
water a hundred and fifty feet high. By the time you have looked at all
the other geysers he will be ready to play.”
So we looked and we wondered at the Beehive, whose mouth is built up
exactly like a hive; at the Turban (which is not in the least like a
turban); and at many, many other geysers, hot holes, and springs. Some
of them rumbled, some hissed, some went off spasmodically, and others
lay still in sheets of sapphire and beryl.
Would you believe that even these terrible creatures have to be guarded
by troopers to prevent the irreverent American from chipping the cones
to pieces, or worse still, making the geysers sick? If you take of
soft-soap a small barrelful and drop it down a geyser’s mouth, that
geyser will presently be forced to lay all before you and for days
afterwards will be of an irritated and inconsistent stomach. When they
told me the tale I was filled with sympathy. Now I wish that I had
stolen soap and tried the experiment on some lonely little beast of a
geyser in the woods. It sounds so probable--and so human.
Yet he would be a bold man who would administer emetics to the
Giantess. She is flat-lipped, having no mouth, she looks like a pool,
fifty feet long and thirty wide, and there is no ornamentation about
her. At irregular intervals she speaks, and sends up a column of water
over two hundred feet high to begin with; then she is angry for a day
and a half--sometimes for two days. Owing to her peculiarity of going
mad in the night not many people have seen the Giantess at her finest;
but the clamour of her unrest, men say, shakes the wooden hotel, and
echoes like thunder among the hills. When I saw her; trouble was
brewing. The pool bubbled seriously, and at five-minute intervals, sank
a foot or two, then rose, washed over the rim, and huge steam bubbles
broke on the top. Just before an eruption the water entirely disappears
from view. Whenever you see the water die down in a geyser-mouth get
away as fast as you can. I saw a tiny little geyser suck in its breath
in this way, and instinct made me retire while it hooted after me.
Leaving the Giantess to swear, and spit, and thresh about, we went
over to Old Faithful, who by reason of his faithfulness has benches
close to him whence you may comfortably watch. At the appointed hour we
heard the water flying up and down the mouth with the sob of waves in a
cave. Then came the preliminary gouts, then a roar and a rush, and that
glittering column of diamonds rose, quivered, stood still for a minute;
then it broke, and the rest was a confused snarl of water not thirty
feet high. All the young ladies--not more than twenty--in the tourist
band remarked that it was “elegant,” and betook themselves to writing
their names in the bottoms of shallow pools. Nature fixes the insult
indelibly, and the after-years will learn that “Hattie,” “Sadie,”
“Mamie,” “Sophie,” and so forth, have taken out their hair-pins, and
scrawled in the face of Old Faithful....
Next morning Tom drove us on, promising new wonders. He pulled up after
a few miles at a clump of brushwood where an army was drowning. I
could hear the sick gasps and thumps of the men going under, but when
I broke through the brushwood the hosts had fled, and there were only
pools of pink, black, and white lime, thick as turbid honey. They shot
up a pat of mud every minute or two, choking in the effort. It was an
uncanny sight. Do you wonder that in the old days the Indians were
careful to avoid the Yellowstone? Geysers are permissible, but mud is
terrifying. The old lady from Chicago took a piece of it, and in half
an hour it died into lime-dust and blew away between her fingers. All
_maya_--illusion,--you see! Then we clinked over sulphur in crystals;
there was a waterfall of boiling water; and a road across a level park
hotly contested by the beavers....
As we climbed the long path the road grew viler and viler till it
became without disguise, the bed of a torrent; and just when things
were at their rockiest we emerged into a little sapphire lake--but
never sapphire was so blue--called Mary’s lake; and that between eight
and nine thousand feet above the sea. Then came grass downs, all on a
vehement slope, so that the buggy following the new-made road ran on
to the two off-wheels mostly, till we dipped head-first into a ford,
climbed up a cliff, raced along a down, dipped again and pulled up
dishevelled at “Larry’s” for lunch and an hour’s rest....
The sun was sinking when we heard the roar of falling waters and
came to a broad river along whose banks we ran. And then--oh, then!
I might at a pinch describe the infernal regions, but not the other
place. Be it known to you that the Yellowstone River has occasion to
run through a gorge about eight miles long. To get to the bottom of
the gorge it makes two leaps, one of about 120 and the other of 300
feet. I investigated the upper or lesser fall, which is close to the
hotel. Up to that time nothing particular happens to the Yellowstone,
its banks being only rocky, rather steep, and plentifully adorned with
pines. At the falls it comes round a corner, green, solid, ribbed with
a little foam, and not more than thirty yards wide. Then it goes over
still green and rather more solid than before. After a minute or two
you, sitting on a rock directly above the drop, begin to understand
that something has occurred; that the river has jumped a huge distance
between the solid cliff walls and what looks like the gentle froth of
ripples lapping the sides of the gorge below is really the outcome of
great waves. And the river yells aloud; but the cliffs do not allow the
yells to escape.
That inspection began with curiosity and finished in terror, for it
seemed that the whole world was sliding in chrysolite from under my
feet. I followed with the others round the corner to arrive at the
brink of the cañon; we had to climb up a nearly perpendicular ascent
to begin with, for the ground rises more than the river drops. Stately
pine woods fringe either lip of the gorge, which is--the Gorge of the
Yellowstone.
All I can say is that without warning or preparation I looked into a
gulf 1,700 feet deep with eagles and fish-hawks circling far below.
And the sides of that gulf were one wild welter of colour--crimson,
emerald, cobalt, ochre, amber, honey splashed with port-wine,
snow-white, vermilion, lemon, and silver-grey, in wide washes. The
sides did not fall sheer, but were graven by time and water and air
into monstrous heads of kings, dead chiefs, men and women of the old
time. So far below that no sound of its strife could reach us, the
Yellowstone River ran--a finger-wide strip of jade-green. The sunlight
took these wondrous walls and gave fresh hues to those that nature had
already laid there. Once I saw the dawn break over a lake in Rajputana
and the sun set over Oodey Sagar amid a circle of Holman Hunt hills.
This time I was watching both performances going on below me--upside
down you understand--and the colours were real! The cañon was burning
like Troy town; but it would not burn forever, and, thank goodness,
neither pen nor brush could ever portray its splendours adequately. The
Academy would reject the picture for a chromo-lithograph. The public
would scoff at the letter-press for _Daily Telegraphese_. “I will
leave this thing alone,” said I; “’tis my peculiar property. Nobody
else shall share it with me.” Evening crept through the pines that
shadowed us, but the full glory of the day flamed in that cañon as we
went out very cautiously to a jutting piece of rock--blood-red or pink
it was--that overhung the deepest deeps of all. Now I know what it is
to sit enthroned amid the clouds of sunset. Giddiness took away all
sensation of touch or form; but the sense of blinding colour remained.
When I reached the mainland again I had sworn that I had been floating.
_From Sea to Sea: Letters of Travel_ (New York, 1899).
FOOTNOTE:
[13] Published by permission of Rudyard Kipling. Copyright, 1899, by
Rudyard Kipling.
Transcriber’s Notes
Several minor punctuation errors have been fixed.
Page vi: changed “Fusi San” to “Fuji-San”.
Page vii: changed “Murdock” to “Murdoch”.
Page 44: changed “Rhone” to “Rhône”.
Page 50: changed “distined” to “destined”.
Page 107: changed “vendure” to “verdure”.
Page 142: changed “destoy” to “destroy”.
Page 144: moved the second Gibraltar illustration to the appropriate
chapter.
Page 148: “Oxeraa” left in place; modern spelling is Öxará.
Page 152: changed “obsure” to “obscure”.
Pages 160 and 168: Both Tindafjall and Tindfjall have been retained
as printed in the original publication.
Page 166: changed “aneriod” to “aneroid”.
Page 205: changed “verdue” to “verdure”.
Page 208: changed “guage” to “gauge”.
Page 216: The open quotation mark before “There was a roaring ... has
been left unmatched as published.
Page 255: “Etna may be is” retained per original publication.
Page 269: changed “Gramnaticus” to “Grammaticus”.
Page 271: changed “quiescient” to “quiescent”.
Page 358: changed “preclude” to “prelude”.