Atlantic, separated from it by a narrow strip of land varying from a
few rods to three miles in width; it is a sheet of pure tide water,
salt, clear and transparent. It has two inlets from the ocean--Indian
River Inlet, about 100 miles from its north head, and Jupiter Inlet at
its extreme southern end. From its north head to within twenty-five
miles of Jupiter Inlet, it is from one to six miles wide; from Jupiter
Inlet to the mouth of the St. Lucie River, a distance of about
twenty-five miles, it is from one-fourth of a mile to a mile in width,
and is known as Jupiter Narrows. It is affected very little by the tide
and the current moves by the wind. Being in the region of the trade
winds, with almost a constant breeze from the east during the daytime,
it affords peculiar facilities for sailing up and down the river, and
the people take advantage of it. Every house is either on the river
bank or a short distance up some navigable stream flowing into it, and
has a boat landing. It is the Venice of America, and one can seldom
look out upon the water without seeing boats sailing both ways. The
river is well supplied with the finest oysters, sea-turtles, and a
great variety of fish, among which are mullet, cavalli, snapper, blue
fish, sheepshead and sea-trout. The manatee is caught at the mouth of
the St. Lucie and Jupiter Inlet. Some of them weigh from 1,500 to 2,000
pounds and are very grand eating. They are found nowhere else in the
United States, their principal habitat being near the mouths of the
streams flowing into the Caribbean Sea, where they feed upon a peculiar
grass called manatee, which grows at the bottom of most tide-water
streams in the tropics.”
Merritt’s Island, which is about forty miles long and contains about
thirty thousand acres is situated in the northern part of the river.
The water on its east side is from one-fourth of a mile to six miles
wide, and is known as Banana River. The shores of Indian River, both on
the west side of Merritt’s Island and on the main land, are free from
swamps and marshes, and rise at an angle of from twenty to twenty-five
degrees to an elevation of from twenty-five to fifty feet. In many
places the banks are high bluffs. The country on Merritt’s Island,
and the west shore has the appearance of an endless park, the timber
being principally scattered pines, with an undergrowth of palmettos and
grass, interspersed with an occasional forest of palm, live oak and
other hard wood timbers.
The orange belt is from one to three miles in width, and is principally
on the west side near the river. West of the orange belt are the St.
John’s prairies, which are unfit for orange culture, but afford fine
pasturage, and are good for vegetables and the culture of sugar-cane
and hay.
The river south of Indian River Inlet, on the eastern shore, is
skirted with a narrow belt of mangrove timber of only a few rods in
width, which is very dense and almost impenetrable. It is a deep
green the entire year, and presents a beautiful appearance. The strip
of land adjacent to the ocean between Jupiter Inlet and the mouth
of St. Lucie River, is known as Jupiter Island, and is about half a
mile wide and twenty miles long. It has some excellent land and is
elevated from fifteen to thirty feet above the sea. The river here, at
Jupiter Narrows, is less than half a mile wide. The western bank is
from forty to fifty feet high and covered with a dense low scrub of
live oak bushes, not more than two or three feet high, and when viewed
from the Island, these heights remind one of the green pastures of the
north--they are always the same colour, a beautiful green. This portion
of the river is full of oysters and the inlet is the finest fishing
on the coast. On the bank of the river, at various places, are large
mounds of clam and oyster shells; the largest of them near Jupiter
Inlet, is nearly a quarter of a mile long and about forty feet high.
At the north end of the river are some fine live oak and palm hummock
lands, very rich and suitable for orange groves, sugar-cane and garden
vegetables. The climate from October to May is a perpetual Indian
summer, commingled with the balmiest days of spring, seldom interrupted
by storms and only with occasional showers, while most of the time
there is a gentle breeze coming inland from the even-tempered waters
of the Gulf Stream. The prevailing winds are easterly, being the trade
winds, which extend as far north as Cape Canaveral and are perceptible
as far north as New Smyrna and St. Augustine. The nights are cool even
in summer--the atmosphere invigourating and health restoring.
Mineral and other springs are frequent, many of them possessing
medicinal properties. Game is abundant--bear, deer, quail and wild
turkeys on the land, ducks on the lakes and rivers, and green turtle
and fish in the waters. All of these, with its beautiful building
sites, its superior surf bathing and boat sailing, the absence of
swamps and marshes, will eventually cause the banks of this magnificent
sheet of water to become one vast villa of winter residences.
THE NILE
J. HOWARD REED
The holy river--“the Jove-descended Nile”--formerly bore the name of
Ægyptus. Professor Rawlinson in his _History of the Ancient Egyptians_,
says: “The term Egypt was not known to the ancient Egyptians
themselves, but appears to have been first used by the Greeks as a name
for the Nile, and thence extended to the country. It is stated by some
authorities that the river received its present title from Nilus, an
ancient king of Thebes, who named the stream after himself.”
“Father Nile” was an object of great veneration to the ancients, and a
gift of its waters was considered by them as a present fit for kings
and queens. The veneration in which the river was held, of course,
arose from the blessings of its annual overflow spread broadcast over
its banks by fertilizing the seed of the sower, producing abundant
crops for the sickle of the reaper, and thus making glad the heart
of man. It is stated that the Arabs in the present day consider it
a delicious privilege to slake their thirst with the salubrious and
agreeable waters of the river, and I have read that they will even
artificially excite thirst to indulge in the pleasure of imbibing
refreshing and satisfying draughts from the “holy stream.” The general
Pescennius Niger is said to have cried to his soldiers: “What! crave
you for wine, when you have the water of the Nile to drink?” Homer is
stated to have said, no doubt referring poetically to its regular and
fertilizing overflow: “The Nile flows down from heaven.” The Egyptians
say that “If Mahomet had tasted the waters of the Nile, he would have
prayed God to make him immortal, that he might have enjoyed them for
ever.”
The river has a total length of considerably over 3,000 miles, and
is remarkable among the rivers of the world from the fact that for
about the last 1,500 miles of its flow it receives no tributary--none,
in fact, after the Albara or Tacazze. The consequence is that, by
the time it reaches the sea, its volume is considerably reduced by
evaporation, and from the large quantity of water used along its banks
for irrigation and other purposes. The river is formed of two principal
branches, the Bahr-el-Azrek, or Blue Nile, and the Bahr-el-Abiad,
or White Nile, the latter of which is the main branch or true
Nile. It receives also, as tributary rivers, the Atbara or Tacazze
before mentioned, with the Sobat and Asua on the east side; and the
Bahr-el-Gazelle on the west; besides other smaller and less important
streams. Its waters are discharged into the Mediterranean through
several mouths, the two principal of which are known as the Rosetta and
Damietta mouths--the first-named being to the west and the other to the
east. The principal island formed by the divisions of the river being
shaped like the fourth letter of the Greek alphabet, takes the name of
Delta; and the Nile is doubtless the river which first suggested what
is now a technical name for all similar formations at the mouths of
rivers.
[Illustration: THE NILE]
The rise and overflow of the Nile caused by the seasonal rains of
the interior, has been for ages noted for its regularity. The rise
commences about midsummer, reaches its greatest height at the autumnal
equinox, and has again subsided by Christmas; leaving the land
highly enriched by the fertilizing sediment of red earth brought down
by the Abyssinian tributaries and deposited by the river. The land can
then be worked and the crops planted. The rise and fall of the river is
watched with great anxiety by the inhabitants of the Nile valley. At
intervals along its banks river gauges, or nilometers, are fixed, upon
which the variations of the river are duly recorded.
Nearly five centuries before the Christian era, the first great African
traveller, Herodotus, writing about the Nile, said: “Respecting the
nature of this river, I was unable to gain any information, either from
the priests or any one else. I was very desirous, however, of learning
from them why the Nile, beginning at the summer solstice, fills and
overflows for a hundred days; and when it has nearly completed this
number of days, falls short in its stream and retires; so that it
continues low all the winter, until the return of the summer solstice.”
Seneca writes that the Emperor Nero sent an exploring expedition under
two centurions with military force to explore the countries along the
banks of the Astapus or White River, and to search for the Nile’s
sources. They passed down the river a considerable distance until
immense marshes were met with. They forced their way through, and
continued their journey southward, until the river was seen “tumbling
down or issuing out between the rocks.” They were then obliged to turn
back and declare their mission a failure. The centurions are stated
to have brought back with them a map of the districts they had passed
through, for the information of the Imperial Nero.
This early expedition succeeded in penetrating about 800 Roman miles
south of Meroe--that is to say, reaching three or four degrees north
latitude. The place where water was seen “tumbling down from between
the rocks” was probably the Fola or Mekade cataract, again discovered
in our own day by the late General Gordon. The river here rushes
through a narrow ravine, over and between rocks of from thirty to
forty feet high. These falls are stated to be the only insurmountable
obstacle to the navigation of the Nile, for vessels of considerable
size, from the Mediterranean to the Albert Lake.
About seventy years later, during the Second Century, we find Claudius
Ptolemy, a celebrated geographer and astrologer of Alexandria, writing
about the Nile and its sources. He tells us that the “holy stream”
rises some twelve degrees south of the equator, in a number of streams
that flow into two lakes, situated east and west of each other; from
which, in turn, issue two rivers; these afterwards unite and form
the Nile. Ptolemy also mentions that in the interior of Africa were
some mountains which he called “_Selenes Oros_”--generally translated
“Mountains of the Moon.”
Following in the steps of Ptolemy, come the Arab geographers, and
they are stated to have practically adopted all his theories and
geographical notions.
Later on we find that the Portuguese travellers obtained a considerable
amount of information regarding the geography of the interior of
Africa. They appear to have had some knowledge of the existence of
several large lakes in the centre of the continent, and in some of
their early maps these lakes find a place.
It appears to have been known to the ancients that the Nile proper is
formed of two principal branches, which join and form one river close
to where the town of Khartoum (or its ruin) now stands; but beyond
this, as we have seen, little authentic information has been handed
down.
In the year 1770, Bruce gave his attention to the Blue Nile. He was
enabled to locate the sources of that branch of the river among the
mountains and highlands of Abyssinia, near Lake Dembea. In 1788, the
African Association was founded, and in furtherance of its objects much
information was obtained of the geography of the “Dark Continent.” In
1827, M. Linant, a French traveller, passed up the White Nile to a
considerable distance above its junction with the Blue Nile branch.
About the year 1840 two Egyptian naval officers headed an expedition,
fitted out by Mahommed Ali, the then ruler of Egypt; they forced their
way through the terrible marshes to within 3° 4″ of the equator; but
were, like the expedition of the Emperor Nero, at last obliged to turn
back.
In 1831, the old African Association was merged into the Royal
Geographical Society, and from then, right down to the present time,
our knowledge of the Nile and its sources has been perfecting itself.
While resting on the plateau land above the south-west corner of the
Albert Lake, on the 25th of May, 1888, Stanley’s attention was called
to a towering mountain height capped with snow, which, from where he
stood, lay about fifty miles away to the south-east. Twelve months
later on his homeward journey, after crossing the Semliki River, which
he found flowing into the south end of the Albert Lake, Stanley found
himself following a range of hills, the tops of which towering up some
19,000 feet high, were covered with perpetual snow. This melting under
the action of a tropical sun, poured its volumes of water into the
Semliki River at his feet, which in turn conveyed it thence to the
Albert Lake and onwards to swell the torrent of Father Nile.
Stanley writes: “Little did we imagine it, but the results of our
journey from the Albert Nyanza to ---- where I turned away from the
newly-discovered lake in 1876, established beyond a doubt that the
snowy mountain, which bears the native name of Ruwenzori or Ruwenjura,
is identical with what the ancients called ‘Mountains of the Moon.’
“Note what Scheadeddin, an Arabian geographer of the Fifteenth Century
writes: ‘From the Mountains of the Moon the Egyptian Nile takes its
rise. It cuts horizontally the equator in its course north. Many rivers
come from this mountain and unite in a great lake. From this lake comes
the Nile, the most beautiful and greatest of the rivers of all the
earth.’”
THE NILE
ISAAC TAYLOR
After a few days at Cairo--one of the most amusing and picturesque
cities in the world--the Express Nile Service of Messrs. Cook brings
the traveller in three days to Luxor, where he will find enough to
occupy him for as many weeks. The first view from the river shows the
appositeness of the epithet Hecatompylos, applied to Thebes by Homer.
Huge cubical masses of masonry--not the gateways of the city, which was
never walled, but the pylons and propylons of the numerous temples--are
seen towering above the palms, and, separated from each other by miles
of verdant plain, roughly indicate the limits of the ancient city.
At Luxor the Nile valley is about ten miles across. The escarpment
of the desert plateau, which elsewhere forms a fringing cliff of
nearly uniform elevation, here breaks into cone-shaped peaks rising
to a height of seventeen hundred feet above the level plain, which
in January is already waving with luxuriant crops--the barley coming
into ear, the lentils and vetches in flower and the tall sugar-canes
beginning to turn yellow. The plain is dotted with Arab villages, each
raised above the level of the inundation on its _tell_, or mound of
ancient _débris_, and embosomed in a grove of date-palms mingled with
the quaint dom-palms characteristic of the Thebiad. Animal life is far
more abundant than in Italy or France. We note the camels and buffaloes
feeding everywhere, tethered in the fields; the great soaring kites
floating in the air; the graceful hoopoos, which take the place of
our English thrushes; the white paddy-birds fishing on the sand-banks
of the river; gay king-fishers, among them the fish-tiger pied in
black and white; the sun-bird, a bee-eater clad in a brilliant coat of
green and gold; the crested lark, the greater and lesser owl, as well
as water-wagtails, pipits, chats and warblers, numerous swifts and
swallows, with an occasional vulture, eagle, cormorant, pelican, or
crane. The jackal is common; and the wolf, the hyena, and the fox are
not unfrequently heard, but seldom seen.
The sunsets on the Nile, if not the finest in the world, are unique
in character. This is probably due to the excessive dryness of the
atmosphere, and to the haze of impalpable dust arising from the fine
mud deposited by the inundation. As the sun descends, he leaves a
pathway or glowing gold reflected from the smooth surface of the Nile.
Any faint streaks of cloud in the west shine out as the tenderest and
most translucent bars of rose; a lurid reflection of the sunset lights
up the eastern sky; then half an hour after sunset a great dome of glow
arises in the west, lemon, changing into the deepest orange, and slowly
dying away into a crimson fringe on the horizon--the glassy mirror of
the Nile gleaming like molten metal; and then, as the last hues of
sunset fade, the zodiacal light, a huge milky cone, shoots up into the
sky.
On moonless nights the stars shine out with a brilliancy unknown in
our misty northern latitudes. About three in the morning the strange
marvel of the Southern Cross rises for an hour or two, the lowest star
of the four appearing through a fortunate depression in the chain of
hills. When the moon is nearly full, the visitors sally out into the
temples to enjoy in the clear, calm and balmy air the mystery of their
dark recesses, enhanced by the brilliant illumination of the thickly
clustered columns. It is a sight, once seen, never to be forgotten.
But the charm of Luxor does not consist mainly in its natural
beauties, though these are not to be despised, but in its unrivalled
historical interest. There is no other site of a great ancient city
which takes you so far and so clearly back into the past. All the
greater monuments of Thebes, all the chief tombs and temples, are older
than the time of Moses; they bear in clearly readable cartouches on
their sculptured walls the names of the great conquering kings of the
eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties--Thotmes III., Amenhotep III.,
Seti I., and Rameses II.--who carried the victorious arms of Egypt to
Ethiopia, Lybia, the Euphrates and the Orontes; the great wall-faces
forming a picture-gallery of their exploits. More modern names on the
temple-walls of Thebes are those of Shishak, who vanquished Rehoboam,
and Tirhakah, the contemporary of Hezekiah. The earliest name yet
found at Thebes is that of Usertasen, a king of the twelfth dynasty,
who lived some forty-three centuries ago; the latest considerable
additions were made by the Ptolemies, and the record finally closes
with a cartouche in which we spell out the hieroglyphic name of the
Emperor Tiberius. But practically the monumental history of Thebes
has ended before that of ancient Rome begins. The arches of Titus and
Constantine, the mausoleum of Hadrian, Trajan’s Column, the Colosseum
and the Catacombs--in short, all the great structures of pre-Christian
Rome--date from a time when Thebes had begun to be forsaken, and the
ruin of her temples had commenced. Even the oldest Roman monuments,
the Cloaca Maxima, the Agger, and the substructures of the Palatine
belong to a period when the greater edifices of Thebes were hoary with
the dust of centuries. When Herodotus, the father of European history,
voyaged up the Nile to Thebes, at a time when the Greeks had not even
heard of an obscure Italian town which bore the name of Rome, the
great temples which he saw, the vocal Memnon which is the statue of
Amenhotep III., and the buildings which he ascribed to a king he called
Sesostris, already belonged to an antiquity as venerable as that which
separates the Heptarchy and the Anglo-Saxon Kings from the reign of
Queen Victoria.
Difficult as it is to realize the antiquity of these monuments, in many
of which the chiselling is as sharp and the colouring as brilliant as
if they had been executed only yesterday, it is still more difficult by
any description to convey an impression of their vastness. The temples
and tombs are scattered over a space of many square miles; single ruins
cover an area of several acres; thousands of square yards of wall
contain only the pictured story of a single campaign. For splendour and
magnitude the group of temples at Karnak, about two miles from Luxor,
forms the most magnificent ruin in the world.
THE DON
ÉLISÉE RÉCLUS
The lands draining to the Sea of Azov, form no sharply defined region,
with bold natural frontiers and distinct populations. The sources of
the Don and its head-streams intermingle with those of the Volga and
Dnieper--some--like the Medveditza, flowing even for some distance
parallel with the Volga. As in the Dnieper and Dniester valleys, the
“black lands” and bare steppes here also follow each other successively
as we proceed southwards, while the population naturally diminishes in
density in the same direction. The land is occupied in the north and
east by the Great Russians, westwards by the Little Russians, in the
south and in New Russia by colonies of every race and tongue, rendering
this region a sort of common territory, where all the peoples of the
empire except the Finns are represented. Owing to the great extent of
the steppes, the population is somewhat less dense than in the Dnieper
basin and Central Russia, but it is yearly and rapidly increasing.
The Don, the root of which is probably contained in its Greek name
Tanaïs, is one of the great European rivers, if not in the volume of
its waters, at least in the length of its course, with its windings
some 1,335 miles altogether. Rising in a lakelet in the government
of Tula, it flows first southwards to its junction with the nearly
parallel Veronej, beyond which point it trends to the south-east,
and even eastwards, as if extending to reach the Volga. After being
enlarged by the Khopor and Medveditza, it arrives within forty-five
miles of that river, above which it has a mean elevation of 138 feet.
Its banks, like those of the Volga, present the normal appearance, the
right being raised and steep, while the left has already been levelled
by the action of the water. Thus the Don flows, as it were, on a
sort of terrace resembling a stair step, the right or western cliffs
seemingly diverting it to the lower Volga bed. Nevertheless, before
reaching that river, it makes a sharp bend first southwards, then
south-westwards to the Sea of Azov.
From a commercial stand-point, it really continues the course of the
Volga. Flowing to a sea which, through the Straits of Yeni-Kaleh, the
Bosphorus, Dardanelles, and Gibraltar, communicates with the ocean,
it has the immense advantage over the Volga of not losing itself in
a land-locked basin. Hence most of the goods brought down the Volga
are landed at the bend nearest the Don, and forwarded to that river.
When besieging Astrakhan the Sultan Selim II. had already endeavoured
to cut a canal between the two rivers, in order to transport his
supplies to the Caspian. Peter the Great resumed the works, but the
undertaking was abandoned, and until the middle of the present century
the portage was crossed only by beasts of burden and wagons. But
since 1861 the rivers have been connected by rail. Free from ice for
about two hundred and forty days at its easternmost bend, the Don
is sometimes so low and blocked with shoals that navigation becomes
difficult even for flat-bottomed boats. During the two floods, at the
melting of the ice in spring, and in the summer rains, its lower course
rises eighteen to twenty feet above its normal level, overflowing its
banks in several places for a distance of eighteen miles. The most
important, although not the most extensive, coal-fields of Russia
cover an area of about 10,000 square miles, chiefly in the southern
part of the Donetz basin. Since 1865, nearly 650 beds have been found,
mostly near the surface, the seams varying in thickness from one foot
to twenty-four feet, and containing every description of combustible
material, from the anthracite to the richest bituminous coal. The
ravines here furrowing the land facilitate the study of the strata and
the extraction of the mineral. Yet these valuable deposits were long
neglected, and even during the Crimean war the Russians, deprived of
their English supplies, were still without the necessary apparatus to
avail themselves of these treasures.
[Illustration: THE DON]
Even the iron ores, which here also abound, were little utilized till
that event, since when the extraction both of coal and iron has gone on
continually increasing in the Donetz basin. In 1839, the yield scarcely
exceeded 14,000 tons, whereas the output of the Grushova mines alone
now amounts to 210,000 tons, and the total yield of the coal-pits
exceeded 672,000 tons in 1872. The coal is now used by the local
railways and steamers of the Don, Sea of Azov, and Euxine.