[Illustration: THE GORGE.]
Reflection swiftly reveals the significance of a river gorge, for it is
upon such a point that the interest of early man is seen to centre. The
shallow, too, attracts him, though its value varies; it must ever be a
doubtful thing, because the shallow depends upon the moods of a river,
and a ford is not always fordable. But to the gorge no flood can reach.
There the river's banks are highest, the aperture between them most
trifling; there man from olden time has found the obvious place of
crossing and thrown his permanent bridge to span the waterway. At a
gorge is the natural point of passage, and Pontifex, the bridge-builder,
seeking that site, bends road to river where his work may be most easily
performed, most securely founded. But while the bridge, its arch
springing from the live rock, is safe enough, the waters beneath are
like to be dangerous, and if a river is navigable at all, at her gorges,
where the restricted volume races and deepens, do the greatest dangers
lie. In Italy this fact gave birth to a tutelary genius, or shadowy
saint, whose special care was the raft-men of Arno and other rivers.
Their dangerous business took these _foderatore_ amid strange hazards,
and one may imagine them on semi-submerged timbers, swirling and
crashing over many a rocky rapid, in the throats of the hills, where
twilight homed and death was ever ready to snatch them from return to
smooth waters and sunshine. So a new guardian arose to meet these
perils, and the boldest navigator lifted his thoughts to Heaven and
commended his soul to the keeping of San Gorgone.
Sublimity haunts these places; be they great as the Grand Canyon of
Arizona and the mountain rifts of Italy and France, or trifling as this
dimple on Devon's face of which I tell to-day, they reveal similar
characteristics and alike challenge the mind of the intelligent being
who may enter them.
Here, under the roof of Devon, through the measures that press up to the
Dartmoor granite and are changed by the vanished heat thereof, a little
Dartmoor stream, in her age-long battle with earth, has cut a right
gorge, and so rendered herself immortal. There came a region in her
downward progress when she found barriers of stone uplifted between her
and her goal; whereupon, without avoiding the encounter, she cast
herself boldly upon the work and set out to cleave and to carve. Now
this glyptic business, begun long before the first palaeolithic man trod
earth, is far advanced; the river has sunk a gulley of near two hundred
feet through the solid rock, and still pursues her way in the nether
darkness, gnawing ceaselessly at the stone and leaving the marks of her
earlier labours high up on either side of the present channel. There,
written on the dark Devonian rock, is a record of erosion set down ages
before human eye can have marked it; for fifty feet above the present
bed are clean-scooped pot-holes, round and true, left by those
prehistoric waters. But the sides of the gorge are mostly broken and
sloping; and upon the shelves of it dwell trees that fling their
branches together with amazing intricacies of foliage in summer-time and
lace-like ramage in winter. Now bright sunshine flashes down the pillars
of them and falls from ledge to ledge of each steep precipice; it
brightens great ivy banks and illuminates a thousand ferns, that stud
each little separate knoll in the great declivities, or loll from clefts
and crannies to break the purple shadows with their fronds. The buckler
and the shield fern leap spritely where there is most light; the
polypody loves the limb of the oak; the hart's tongue haunts the
coolest, darkest crevices and hides the beauty of silvery mosses and
filmy ferns under cover of each crinkled leaf. And secret waters twinkle
out by many a hidden channel to them, bedewing their foliage with grey
moisture.
On a cloudy day night never departs from the deepest caverns of this
gorge, and only the foam-light reveals each polished rib and buttress.
The air is full of mist from a waterfall that thunders through the
darkness, and chance of season and weather seldom permit the westering
sun to thrust a red-gold shaft into the gloom. But that rare moment is
worth pilgrimage, for then the place awakens and a thousand magic
passages of brightness pierce the gorge to reveal its secrets. In such
moments shall be seen the glittering concavities, the fair pillars and
arches carved by the water, and the hidden forms of delicate life that
thrive upon them, dwelling in darkness and drinking of the foam. Most
notable is a crimson fungus that clings to the dripping precipices like
a robe, so that they seem made of polished bloodstone, and hint the
horror of some tragedy in these loud shouting caves. Below the mass of
the river, very dark under its creaming veil of foam, shouts and
hastens; above, there slope upwards the cliff-masses to a mere ribbon of
golden-green, high aloft where the trees admit rare flashes from the
azure above them. Beech and ash spring horizontally from the precipices,
and great must be the bedded strength of the roots that hold their
trunks hanging there. With the dark forces of the gorge dragging them
downward and the sunshine drawing them triumphantly up--between
gravitation and light--they poise, destruction beneath and life
beckoning from above. They nourish thus above their ultimate graves,
since they, too, must fall at last and join those dead tree skeletons
whose bones are glimmering amid the rocks below.
Here light and darkness so cunningly blend that size is forgotten, as
always happens before a thing inherently fine. The small gorge wrought
of a little river grows great and bulks large to imagination. The
soaring sides of it, the shadow-loving things beneath, the torture of
the trees above, and the living water, busy as of yore in levelling its
ancient bed to the sea, waken wonder at such conquest over these
fire-baked rocks. The heart goes out to the river and takes pleasure to
follow her from the darkness of her battle into the light again, where,
flower-crowned, she emerges between green banks that shelve gently, hung
with wood-rush and meadow-sweet, angelica and golden saxifrage. Here
through a great canopy of translucent foliage shines the noon sunlight,
celebrating peace. Into the river, where she spreads upon a smooth pool,
and trout dart shadowy through the crystal, the brightness burns, until
the stream bed sparkles with amber and agate and flashes up in sweet
reflections beneath each brier and arched fern-frond bending at the
brink.
Nor does the rivulet lack correspondence with greater streams in its
human relation; she is complete in every particular, for man has found
her also; and dimly seen, amid the very tree-tops, where the gorge
opens, and great rocks come kissing close, an arch of stone carries his
little road from hamlet to hamlet.