plantation of Malta as an occasion of special importance; its insular
position and the unity of its geological structure both tend to simplify
the question. There are certain points about the existing climate,
moreover, which seem specially calculated to throw the influence of
woods into a strong relief. Thus, during four summer months, there is
practically no rainfall. Thus, again, the northerly winds when stormy,
and especially in winter, tend to depress the temperature very suddenly;
and thus, too, the southerly and south-westerly winds, which raise the
temperature during their prevalence to from eighty-eight to ninety-eight
degrees, seldom last longer than a few hours; insomuch that "their
disagreeable heat and dryness may be escaped by carefully closing the
windows and doors of apartments at their onset."[58] Such sudden and
short variations seem just what is wanted to accentuate the differences
in question. Accordingly, the opportunity seems one not lightly to be
lost, and the British Association or this Society itself might take the
matter up and establish a series of observations, to be continued during
the next few years. Such a combination of favourable circumstances may
not occur again for years; and when the whole subject is at a standstill
for want of facts, the present occasion ought not to go past unimproved.
Such observations might include the following:--
The observation of maximum and minimum thermometers in three different
classes of situation--_videlicet_, in the areas selected for plantation
themselves, at places in the immediate neighbourhood of those areas
where the external influence might be expected to reach its maximum, and
at places distant from those areas where the influence might be expected
to be least.
The observation of rain-gauges and hygrometers at the same three
descriptions of locality.
In addition to the ordinary hours of observation, special readings of
the thermometers should be made as often as possible at a change of wind
and throughout the course of the short hot breezes alluded to already,
in order to admit of the recognition and extension of Herr Rivoli's
comparison.
Observation of the periods and forces of the land and sea breezes.
Gauging of the principal springs, both in the neighbourhood of the areas
of plantation and at places far removed from those areas.
1873.
FOOTNOTES:
[45] Read before the Royal Society, Edinburgh, 19th May 1873, and
reprinted from the _Proceedings_ R.S.E.
[46] _Jour. Scot. Met. Soc._, New Ser. xxvi. 35.
[47] Quoted by Mr. Milne Home.
[48] _Atlas Meteorologique de l'Observatoire Imperial_, 1867.
[49] _Comptes Rendus de l'Academie_, 29th March 1869.
[50] Professor Balfour's "Class Book of Botany," Physiology, chap.
xii., p. 670.
[51] _Comptes Rendus_, 1867 and 1869.
[52] See his paper.
[53] _Annales de Chimie et de Physique_, xlv., 1830. A more detailed
comparison of the climates in question would be a most interesting
and important contribution to the subject.
[54] Reviewed in the _Austrian Meteorological Magazine_, vol. iv.;
p. 543.
[55] _Comptes Rendus_, 28th May 1860.
[56] _Ibid._, 20th May 1861.
[57] Becquerel, "Climats," p. 141.
[58] Scoresby-Jackson's "Medical Climatology."
ESSAYS OF TRAVEL
ESSAYS OF TRAVEL
I
DAVOS IN WINTER
A mountain valley has, at the best, a certain prison-like effect on the
imagination, but a mountain valley, an Alpine winter, and an invalid's
weakness make up among them a prison of the most effective kind. The
roads indeed are cleared, and at least one footpath dodging up the hill;
but to these the health-seeker is rigidly confined. There are for him no
cross-cuts over the field, no following of streams, no unguided rambles
in the wood. His walks are cut and dry. In five or six different
directions he can push as far, and no farther, than his strength
permits; never deviating from the line laid down for him and beholding
at each repetition the same field of wood and snow from the same corner
of the road. This, of itself, would be a little trying to the patience
in the course of months; but to this is added, by the heaped mantle of
the snow, an almost utter absence of detail and an almost unbroken
identity of colour. Snow, it is true, is not merely white. The sun
touches it with roseate and golden lights. Its own crushed infinity of
crystals, its own richness of tiny sculpture, fills it, when regarded
near at hand, with wonderful depths of coloured shadow, and, though
wintrily transformed, it is still water, and has watery tones of blue.
But, when all is said, these fields of white and blots of crude black
forest are but a trite and staring substitute for the infinite variety
and pleasantness of the earth's face. Even a boulder, whose front is too
precipitous to have retained the snow, seems, if you come upon it in
your walk, a perfect gem of colour, reminds you almost painfully of
other places, and brings into your head the delights of more Arcadian
days--the path across the meadow, the hazel dell, the lilies on the
stream, and the scents, the colours, and the whisper of the woods. And
scents here are as rare as colours. Unless you get a gust of kitchen in
passing some hotel, you shall smell nothing all day long but the faint
and choking odour of frost. Sounds, too, are absent: not a bird pipes,
not a bough waves, in the dead, windless atmosphere. If a sleigh goes
by, the sleigh-bells ring, and that is all; you work all winter through
to no other accompaniment but the crunching of your steps upon the
frozen snow.
It is the curse of the Alpine valleys to be each one village from one
end to the other. Go where you please, houses will still be in sight,
before and behind you, and to the right and left. Climb as high as an
invalid is able, and it is only to spy new habitations nested in the
wood. Nor is that all; for about the health resort the walks are
besieged by single people walking rapidly with plaids about their
shoulders, by sudden troops of German boys trying to learn to joedel, and
by German couples silently and, as you venture to fancy, not quite
happily, pursuing love's young dream. You may perhaps be an invalid who
likes to make bad verses as he walks about. Alas! no muse will suffer
this imminence of interruption--and at the second stampede of joedellers
you find your modest inspiration fled. Or you may only have a taste for
solitude; it may try your nerves to have some one always in front whom
you are visibly overtaking, and some one always behind who is audibly
overtaking you, to say nothing of a score or so who brush past you in an
opposite direction. It may annoy you to take your walks and seats in
public view. Alas! there is no help for it among the Alps. There are no
recesses, as in Gorbio Valley by the oil-mill; no sacred solitude of
olive gardens on the Roccabruna-road; no nook upon St. Martin's Cape,
haunted by the voice of breakers, and fragrant with the three-fold
sweetness of the rosemary and the sea-pines and the sea.
For this publicity there is no cure, and no alleviation; but the storms
of which you will complain so bitterly while they endure, chequer and by
their contrast brighten the sameness of the fair-weather scenes. When
sun and storm contend together--when the thick clouds are broken up and
pierced by arrows of golden daylight--there will be startling
rearrangements and transfigurations of the mountain summits. A
sun-dazzling spire of alp hangs suspended in mid-sky among awful glooms
and blackness; or perhaps the edge of some great mountain shoulder will
be designed in living gold, and appear for the duration of a glance
bright like a constellation, and alone "in the unapparent." You may
think you know the figure of these hills; but when they are thus
revealed, they belong no longer to the things of earth--meteors we
should rather call them, appearances of sun and air that endure but for
a moment and return no more. Other variations are more lasting, as when,
for instance, heavy and wet snow has fallen through some windless hours,
and the thin, spiry mountain pine-trees stand each stock-still and
loaded with a shining burthen. You may drive through a forest so
disguised, the tongue-tied torrent struggling silently in the cleft of
the ravine, and all still except the jingle of the sleigh bells, and you
shall fancy yourself in some untrodden northern territory--Lapland,
Labrador, or Alaska.
Or, possibly, you arise very early in the morning; totter down-stairs in
a state of somnambulism; take the simulacrum of a meal by the glimmer of
one lamp in the deserted coffee-room; and find yourself by seven o'clock
outside in a belated moonlight and a freezing chill. The mail sleigh
takes you up and carries you on, and you reach the top of the ascent in
the first hour of the day. To trace the fires of the sunrise as they
pass from peak to peak, to see the unlit tree-tops stand out soberly
against the lighted sky, to be for twenty minutes in a wonderland of
clear, fading shadows, disappearing vapours, solemn blooms of dawn,
hills half glorified already with the day and still half confounded with
the greyness of the western heaven--these will seem to repay you for the
discomforts of that early start; but as the hour proceeds, and these
enchantments vanish, you will find yourself upon the farther side in yet
another Alpine valley, snow white and coal black, with such another
long-drawn congeries of hamlets and such another senseless watercourse
bickering along the foot. You have had your moment; but you have not
changed the scene. The mountains are about you like a trap; you cannot
foot it up a hillside and behold the sea as a great plain, but live in
holes and corners, and can change only one for another.
II
HEALTH AND MOUNTAINS
There has come a change in medical opinion, and a change has followed in
the lives of sick folk. A year or two ago and the wounded soldiery of
mankind were all shut up together in some basking angle of the Riviera,
walking a dusty promenade or sitting in dusty olive-yards within earshot
of the interminable and unchanging surf--idle among spiritless idlers
not perhaps dying, yet hardly living either, and aspiring, sometimes
fiercely, after livelier weather and some vivifying change. These were
certainly beautiful places to live in, and the climate was wooing in its
softness. Yet there was a later shiver in the sunshine; you were not
certain whether you were being wooed; and these mild shores would
sometimes seem to you to be the shores of death. There was a lack of a
manly element; the air was not reactive; you might write bits of poetry
and practise resignation, but you did not feel that here was a good
spot to repair your tissue or regain your nerve. And it appears, after
all, that there was something just in these appreciations. The invalid
is now asked to lodge on wintry Alps; a ruder air shall medicine him;
the demon of cold is no longer to be fled from, but bearded in his den.
For even Winter has his "dear domestic cave," and in those places where
he may be said to dwell for ever tempers his austerities.
Any one who has travelled westward by the great transcontinental
railroad of America must remember the joy with which he perceived, after
the tedious prairies of Nebraska and across the vast and dismal
moorlands of Wyoming, a few snowy mountain summits along the southern
sky. It is among these mountains in the new State of Colorado that the
sick man may find, not merely an alleviation of his ailments, but the
possibility of an active life and an honest livelihood. There, no longer
as a lounger in a plaid, but as a working farmer, sweating at his work,
he may prolong and begin anew his life. Instead of the bath-chair, the
spade; instead of the regulated walk, rough journeys in the forest, and
the pure, rare air of the open mountains for the miasma of the
sick-room--these are the changes offered him, with what promise of
pleasure and of self-respect, with what a revolution in all his hopes
and terrors, none but an invalid can know. Resignation, the cowardice
that apes a kind of courage and that lives in the very air of health
resorts, is cast aside at a breath of such a prospect. The man can open
the door; he can be up and doing; he can be a kind of a man after all
and not merely an invalid.
But it is a far cry to the Rocky Mountains. We cannot all of us go
farming in Colorado; and there is yet a middle term, which combines the
medical benefits of the new system with the moral drawbacks of the old.
Again the invalid has to lie aside from life and its wholesome duties;
again he has to be an idler among idlers; but this time at a great
altitude, far among the mountains, with the snow piled before his door
and the frost flowers every morning on his window. The mere fact is
tonic to his nerves. His choice of a place of wintering has somehow to
his own eyes the air of an act of bold contract; and, since he has
wilfully sought low temperatures, he is not so apt to shudder at a touch
of chill. He came for that, he looked for it, and he throws it from him
with the thought.
A long straight reach of valley, wall-like mountains upon either hand
that rise higher and higher and shoot up new summits the higher you
climb; a few noble peaks seen even from the valley; a village of hotels;
a world of black and white--black pine-woods, clinging to the sides of
the valley, and white snow flouring it, and papering it between the
pine-woods, and covering all the mountains with a dazzling curd; add a
few score invalids marching to and fro upon the snowy road, or skating
on the ice-rinks, possibly to music, or sitting under sunshades by the
door of the hotel--and you have the larger features of a mountain
sanatorium. A certain furious river runs curving down the valley; its
pace never varies, it has not a pool for as far as you can follow it;
and its unchanging, senseless hurry is strangely tedious to witness. It
is a river that a man could grow to hate. Day after day breaks with the
rarest gold upon the mountain spires, and creeps, growing and glowing,
down into the valley. From end to end the snow reverberates the
sunshine; from end to end the air tingles with the light, clear and dry
like crystal. Only along the course of the river, but high above it,
there hangs far into the noon one waving scarf of vapour. It were hard
to fancy a more engaging feature in a landscape; perhaps it is harder to
believe that delicate, long-lasting phantom of the atmosphere, a
creature of the incontinent stream whose course it follows. By noon the
sky is arrayed in an unrivalled pomp of colour--mild and pale and
melting in the north, but towards the zenith, dark with an intensity of
purple blue. What with this darkness of heaven and the intolerable
lustre of the snow, space is reduced again to chaos. An English painter,
coming to France late in life, declared with natural anger that "the
values were all wrong." Had he got among the Alps on a bright day he
might have lost his reason. And even to any one who has looked at
landscape with any care, and in any way through the spectacles of
representative art, the scene has a character of insanity. The distant
shining mountain peak is here beside your eye; the neighbouring
dull-coloured house in comparison is miles away; the summit, which is
all of splendid snow, is close at hand; the nigh slopes, which are black
with pine-trees, bear it no relation, and might be in another sphere.
Here there are none of those delicate gradations, those intimate, misty
joinings-on and spreadings-out into the distance, nothing of that art of
air and light by which the face of nature explains and veils itself in
climes which we may be allowed to think more lovely. A glaring piece of
crudity, where everything that is not white is a solecism and defies the
judgment of the eyesight; a scene of blinding definition; a parade of
daylight, almost scenically vulgar, more than scenically trying, and yet
hearty and healthy, making the nerves to tighten and the mouth to smile:
such is the winter daytime in the Alps. With the approach of evening all
is changed. A mountain will suddenly intercept the sun; a shadow fall
upon the valley; in ten minutes the thermometer will drop as many
degrees; the peaks that are no longer shone upon dwindle into ghosts;
and meanwhile, overhead, if the weather be rightly characteristic of the
place, the sky fades towards night through a surprising key of colours.
The latest gold leaps from the last mountain. Soon, perhaps, the moon
shall rise, and in her gentler light the valley shall be mellowed and
misted, and here and there a wisp of silver cloud upon a hilltop, and
here and there a warmly glowing window in a house, between fire and
starlight, kind and homely in the fields of snow.
But the valley is not seated so high among the clouds to be eternally
exempt from changes. The clouds gather, black as ink; the wind bursts
rudely in; day after day the mists drive overhead, the snowflakes
flutter down in blinding disarray; daily the mail comes in later from
the top of the pass; people peer through their windows and foresee no
end but an entire seclusion from Europe, and death by gradual dry-rot,
each in his indifferent inn; and when at last the storm goes and the sun
comes again, behold a world of unpolluted snow, glossy like fur, bright
like daylight, a joy to wallowing dogs and cheerful to the souls of men.
Or perhaps from across storied and malarious Italy, a wind cunningly
winds about the mountains and breaks, warm and unclean, upon our
mountain valley. Every nerve is set ajar; the conscience recognises, at
a gust, a load of sins and negligences hitherto unknown; and the whole
invalid world huddles into its private chambers, and silently recognises
the empire of the Foehn.
III
ALPINE DIVERSIONS
There will be no lack of diversion in an Alpine sanatorium. The place is
half English, to be sure, the local sheet appearing in double column,
text and translation; but it still remains half German; and hence we
have a band which is able to play, and a company of actors able, as you
will be told, to act. This last you will take on trust, for the players,
unlike the local sheet, confine themselves to German; and though at the
beginning of winter they come with their wig-boxes to each hotel in
turn, long before Christmas they will have given up the English for a
bad job. There will follow, perhaps, a skirmish between the two races;
the German element seeking, in the interest of their actors, to raise a
mysterious item, the _Kur-taxe_, which figures heavily enough already
in the weekly bills, the English element stoutly resisting. Meantime in
the English hotels home-played farces, _tableaux-vivants_, and even
balls enliven the evenings; a charity bazaar sheds genial consternation;
Christmas and New Year are solemnised with Pantagruelian dinners, and
from time to time the young folks carol and revolve untunefully enough
through the figures of a singing quadrille. A magazine club supplies you
with everything, from the _Quarterly_ to the _Sunday at Home_. Grand
tournaments are organised at chess, draughts, billiards, and whist. Once
and again wandering artists drop into our mountain valley, coming you
know not whence, going you cannot imagine whither, and belonging to
every degree in the hierarchy of musical art, from the recognised
performer who announces a concert for the evening, to the comic German
family or solitary long-haired German baritone, who surprises the guests
at dinner-time with songs and a collection. They are all of them good to
see; they, at least, are moving; they bring with them the sentiment of
the open road; yesterday, perhaps, they were in Tyrol, and next week
they will be far in Lombardy, while all we sick folk still simmer in our
mountain prison. Some of them, too, are welcome as the flowers in May
for their own sake; some of them may have a human voice; some may have
that magic which transforms a wooden box into a song-bird, and what we
jeeringly call a fiddle into what we mention with respect as a violin.
From that grinding lilt, with which the blind man, seeking pence,
accompanies the beat of paddle wheels across the ferry, there is surely
a difference rather of kind than of degree to that unearthly voice of
singing that bewails and praises the destiny of man at the touch of the
true virtuoso. Even that you may perhaps enjoy; and if you do so you
will own it impossible to enjoy it more keenly than here, _im Schnee der
Alpen_. A hyacinth in a pot, a handful of primroses packed in moss, or a
piece of music by some one who knows the way to the heart of a violin,
are things that, in this invariable sameness of the snows and frosty
air, surprise you like an adventure. It is droll, moreover, to compare
the respect with which the invalids attend a concert, and the ready
contempt with which they greet the dinner-time performers. Singing which
they would hear with real enthusiasm--possibly with tears--from a corner
of a drawing-room, is listened to with laughter when it is offered by an
unknown professional and no money has been taken at the door.
Of skating little need be said; in so snowy a climate the rinks must be
intelligently managed; their mismanagement will lead to many days of
vexation and some petty quarrelling, but when all goes well, it is
certainly curious, and perhaps rather unsafe, for the invalid to skate
under a burning sun, and walk back to his hotel in a sweat, through long
tracts of glare and passages of freezing shadow. But the peculiar
outdoor sport of this district is tobogganing. A Scotsman may remember
the low flat board, with the front wheels on a pivot, which was called a
_hurlie_; he may remember this contrivance, laden with boys, as,
laboriously started, it ran rattling down the brae, and was, now
successfully, now unsuccessfully, steered round the corner at the foot;
he may remember scented summer evenings passed in this diversion, and
many a grazed skin, bloody cockscomb, and neglected lesson. The toboggan
is to the hurlie what the sled is to the carriage; it is a hurlie upon
runners; and if for a grating road you substitute a long declivity of
beaten snow, you can imagine the giddy career of the tobogganist. The
correct position is to sit; but the fantastic will sometimes sit
hindforemost, or dare the descent upon their belly or their back. A few
steer with a pair of pointed sticks, but it is more classical to use the
feet. If the weight be heavy and the track smooth, the toboggan takes
the bit between its teeth; and to steer a couple of full-sized friends
in safety requires not only judgment but desperate exertion. On a very
steep track, with a keen evening frost, you may have moments almost too
appalling to be called enjoyment; the head goes, the world vanishes;
your blind steed bounds below your weight; you reach the foot, with all
the breath knocked out of your body, jarred and bewildered as though you
had just been subjected to a railway accident. Another element of joyful
horror is added by the formation of a train; one toboggan being tied to
another, perhaps to the number of half a dozen, only the first rider
being allowed to steer, and all the rest pledged to put up their feet
and follow their leader, with heart in mouth, down the mad descent.
This, particularly if the track begins with a headlong plunge, is one of
the most exhilarating follies in the world, and the tobogganing invalid
is early reconciled to somersaults.