_KILLARNEY._
The total amount of heat which the sun sends annually to the earth is
invariable, and hence if any portion of the earth’s surface during
any given year be colder than ordinary, we may infer with certainty
that some other portion of the surface is then warmer than ordinary.
The port of Odessa owes its importance to a case of atmospheric
compensation of this kind. Forty or fifty years ago, Western Europe
received less than its normal amount of heat; the missing sunbeams
fell upon the East, and Odessa became, to some extent, the granary
from which the hungry West was fed. The position it then assumed it
has since maintained. The atmosphere is the grand distributor of heat.
It has its cold and warm currents--vast aërial rivers, which chill or
cheer according to the proximate sources from which they are derived.
In this present year 1860 the British Isles appear to lie near the
common boundary of two such currents--the limit, however, shifting
so as to cause both to pass over us in swift succession. Near this
boundary line the atmospheric currents mingle, and the copious aqueous
precipitation which we now observe is the result.
Superadded to this source of general rain, we have at Killarney local
condensers in the neighbouring mountains. Round the cool crests of
Carrantual and his peaked and craggy brothers the moist and tilted
south-west wind curdles ceaselessly into clouds, which nourish the
moss and heather whose decomposition produces the peat which clothes
the disintegrated rocks. Grandly the vast cumuli build themselves
in the atmosphere, hanging at times lazily over the mountains and
mottling with their shadows the brown sides of the hills. Reddened
by the evening sun, these clouds cast their hues upon the lakes, the
crisped surface of which breaks up their images into broad spaces of
diffused crimson light. On other days the cumuli seem whipped into
dust, and scattered through the general air, mixing therewith as the
smoke of London mingles with the supernatant atmosphere. Day by day the
guides prophesy fine weather--the blackest cloud is ‘all for hate.’
You are assured that if you start to-day you will not get ‘a single
dhrop’ of rain; you go, and are drenched; but the guide’s purpose is
accomplished, the moderate sum of three and sixpence being added to his
private store.
In ages past these mountain condensers acted differently. The wet winds
of the ocean, which now descend in liquid showers upon the hills, once
discharged their contents as snow. And a famous deposit they must have
made. In addition to the charms which this region presents to every
eye, the mind of him who can read the rocks aright is carried back to a
time when deep snowbeds cumbered the mountain-slopes, and vast glaciers
filled the vales. In neither England nor Wales do the traces of glacial
action reach the magnitude which they exhibit here.
The Gap of Dunloe is the channel of an ancient glacier; and all through
it the scratching and polishing may be traced. The flanks of the
Purple Mountain have been planed down by the moving ice, and the rocky
amphitheatre which the guides choose for the production of echoes has
been scooped and polished by the same agency. Near the point where the
road from the Gap joins that up the Black Valley is a slab of rock,
which rivals the famous _Höllen Platte_ in Haslithal. The Black Valley,
indeed, was the mould through which a great glacier from the adjacent
mountains moved, ‘unhasting, unresting,’ grinding the rocks right and
left, and filling the entire basin now occupied by the waters of the
Upper Lake. All the islands of this lake are glacier domes. The shapes,
moreover, which have suggested the fanciful names given to some of the
rocks are entirely due to the planing of the ice. The ‘Cannon Rock,’
the ‘Giant’s Coffin,’ the ‘Man-of-War,’ and others, owe their forms to
the mighty moulding-plane which in bygone ages passed over them.
I have spoken of the echoes in the Gap of Dunloe. They are very fine,
and are usually awakened by a guide who plays a bugle, and to whom
extra wages are paid on this account. The man times his operations so
that the echo and the original sound shall not overlap, and he usually
places his guests behind a hill-brow, which partially cuts away the
direct sound, but offers no impediment to the echoes. He flourishes his
trumpet, and pauses; the rocks respond, the first return of the sound
being almost as strong as the blast itself; the sonorous pulses leap
from crag to crag, and from them to the listener’s ear, diminishing in
intensity and augmenting in softness the oftener they are reflected.
Moore’s melody of ‘The Meeting of the Waters,’ suitably played, is thus
returned with exquisite sweetness by the reflecting rocks.
The rain here is pitiless, but the march of the showering clouds over
the mountains is sometimes very grand. One really good day is all that
I have been able to number out of six spent on the banks of the Lower
Lake, and even that day was ushered in by heavy rain. Afterwards,
however, the cloud field broke, and the condensed vapours rolled
themselves up into sphered masses, which sailed majestically through
the ether. With some other visitors I rowed to the Upper Lake, landed
at the base of the Purple Mountain, and with one companion climbed the
latter to its crest. This is covered by loose masses of stone of a
purplish hue, from which the mountain derives its name.
A few days previously I had been on the top of Mangerton, a spot
selected by the guides as affording a prospect of the entire region
of the Lakes. But Mangerton is a stupid mountain, and it is climbed
by a wearisome pony track. It is incomparably inferior to the Purple
Mountain. From the latter, on one side, we look into the heart of
Magillicuddy’s Reeks, and shake hands with Carrantual across the
Gap of Dunloe. It commands a splendid mountain panorama, and on the
occasion of my visit showed the Reeks in their true character, as
cloud-generators. A light wind swept across them. Far to westward,
towards the sea, the air was cloudless; but over the Reeks its moisture
was densely precipitated, and formed there a canopy which threw an
inky gloom upon the mountains. The clouds sometimes descended so as
to touch the summits, but for the most part they floated a little way
above them, leaving the jagged outlines clear. From the Reeks the
clouds were wafted westward; but here, meeting with warmer air, they
diminished in size, the smaller ones melting quite away. Below us
gleamed the Upper Lake, running in and out amid the mountains, fringed
with woods and studded with islands covered with sunny foliage. From
this lake a long, sinuous, and narrow outlet, called the Long Range,
runs to the Middle Lake. The suddenness with which this lovely sheet of
water opens on quitting the Long Range constitutes perhaps the greatest
surprise which the traveller here encounters.
We walked along the ridge of the Purple Mountain ankle deep in elastic
moss, with glorious views at either side. Arrived at the end of its
greatest spur, the Middle and Lower Lakes with their islands, and the
wooded and tortuous peninsula between them, lay before us. No view of
the English lakes known to me could compete in loveliness with this
one. We passed onward through the heather to the brow above the Bay of
Glena, and there clambered down the mountain, helping ourselves by the
trees which grasped with gnarled roots the mossed and slippy crags.
At Glena we met our boat, and were rowed over the jerking waves to
the island of Innisfallen, and thence to our hotel. Various bits of
climbing were accomplished during my stay, and almost in every case
in opposition to the guides. The Eagle Rock, for example, a truly
noble mass, and others, were climbed, amid emphatic enunciations of
‘impossible.’ Yet these guides and boatmen are fine, hardy fellows, and
of great endurance, but they appear averse to trying their strength
under new conditions.
I write on a drenching day, and a strong wind which wails dismally
round the house has roused the Lower Lake to foam and fury. Innisfallen
looms feebly through the grey haze, but the opposite Toumies mountains
are plunged in impenetrable gloom. All round the horizon is built a
black cloud-wall, but the zenithal heaven is clear. Over the coping
of this thunderous bulwark the sun shoots his rays, which, meeting
the dropping cloud of the opposite heaven, paint upon it a complete
and magnificent bow. Here the white beam enters the front of the
falling drop, and is reflected at its back, emerging unravelled to its
component hues. But the condition is, that after being thus unravelled,
the coloured rays shall not diverge on quitting the drop. If they did,
they would be lost immediately to the senses; but they are squeezed
together to parallel sheaves, and thus their intensity is preserved
through long aërial distances. Above the vivid bow hangs its spectral
secondary brother, in which a double reflection within each raindrop
enfeebles the colours, and inverts the order of succession.
Touched by the wand of law, the dross of facts becomes gold, the
meanest being raised thereby to brotherhood with the highest. Thus the
smoke of an Irish cabin lifts our speculations to the heavenly dome.
We look through the cloudless air at the darkness of infinite space,
and are met by the azure of the firmament--we look through a long reach
of the same atmosphere at the bright sun or moon and see them orange
or red. We look through the peat-smoke at a black rock, or at the dark
branches of a yew, and see the smoke blue--we look through the same
smoke at a cloud illuminated to whiteness by the sun and find the smoke
red. The selfsame column of smoke may be projected against a bright
and a dark portion of the same cloud, and thus made to appear blue
and red at the same time. The blue belongs to the light _reflected_
from the smoke; the red to the light _transmitted_ through it. In like
manner, the hues of the atmosphere are not due to colouring matter, but
to the fact of its being a turbid medium. Through this we look at the
blackness of unillumined space and see the blue; at the western heaven
at sunset, and meet that light which steeps the clouds of evening in
orange and crimson dyes.