Part 10
And we went on and on along the waterfall towards Top Island, always on smooth paths covered with saw-dust to Polhelm’s-Sluice; a cleft has been made in the rock for the first intended sluice-work, which was not finished, but on account of which has been shaped the most imposing of all the Trollhätta Falls; the hurrying water falls perpendicularly into the dark depth. The side of the rock here is connected with Top Island by means of a light iron bridge, which seems to be thrown over the abyss; we venture on this swaying bridge above the rushing, whirling water, and soon stand on the little rocky island between firs and pines that dart out of the crevices; before us rushes a sea of waves, broken as they rebound against the rock on which we stand, spraying us with their fine eternal mist; on each side the torrent flows as if shot from a gigantic cannon, waterfall upon waterfall; we look above them all and are lulled by the harmonic tone that has existed for thousands of years.
“No one can ever get to that island over there,” said one of our party, pointing to the large island above the highest fall.
“I know one who got there!” exclaimed the old man, and nodded with a peculiar smile.
“Yes, my grandfather got there!” said one of the boys, “but for a hundred years scarcely any one else has reached it. The cross that stands there was set up by my grandfather. It had been a severe winter, the whole of Lake Venern was frozen, the ice dammed up the outlet, and for many hours the bottom was dry. Grandfather has told us about it: he and two others went over, set up the cross, and returned. Just then there was a thundering and cracking noise just like cannon, the ice broke up and the stream overflowed meadows and forest. It is true, every word I say!”
[Illustration: TROLLHÄTTA.]
One of the travellers cited Tegner:
“Vildt Göta stortade fran Fjallen, Hemsk Trollet fran sat Toppfall röt! Men Snillet kom och sprängt stod Hallen, Med Skeppen i sitt sköt!”
“Poor mountain sprite,” he added, “thy power and glory are failing! Man flies beyond thee--Thou must learn of him!”
The garrulous old man made a grimace, and muttered something to himself--but we were now by the bridge before the inn, the steamboat glided through the open way, every one hurried on board and immediately it shot above the Fall just as if no Fall existed.
It was evening; I stood on the heights of Trollhätta’s old sluices, and saw the ships with outspread sails glide away over the meadows like large white spectres. The sluice-gates opened with a heavy, crashing sound like that related of the copper gates of the _Vehmgericht_; the evening was so still; in the deep silence the tone of the Trollhätta Fall was like a chorus of a hundred water-mills, ever one and the same tone and sometimes the ringing of a deep and mighty note that seemed to pass through the very earth--and yet through all this the eternal silence of Nature was felt;--suddenly a great bird with heavily flapping wings flew out of the trees in the deep woods towards the waterfall. Was it the mountain sprite? We must believe so.
_Pictures of Sweden_ (Leipzig, 1851).
THE GRAND CANYON OF THE COLORADO
(_UNITED STATES_)
C. F. GORDON-CUMMING
Probably the greatest chasm in the known world is the grand canyon of the Colorado river (the Rio Colorado Grande), which is a gorge upward of two hundred miles in length, and of tremendous depth. Throughout this distance its vertical crags measure from _one_ to upwards of _six thousand feet_ in depth! Think of it! The highest mountain in Scotland measures 4,418 feet. The height of Niagara is 145 feet. And here is a narrow, tortuous pass where the river has eaten its way to a depth of 6,200 feet between vertical granite crags!
Throughout this canyon there is no cascade; and though the river descends 16,000 feet within a very short distance, forming rushing rapids, it is nevertheless possible to descend it by a raft--and this has actually been done, in defiance of the most appalling dangers and hardships. It is such a perilous adventure as to be deemed worthy of note even in this country, where every prospector carries his life in his hand, and to whom danger is the seasoning of daily life, which, without it, would appear positively monotonous.
I suppose no river in the world passes through scenery so extraordinary as does the Colorado river, in its journey of 2,000 miles from its birthplace in the Rocky mountains, till, traversing the burning plains of New Mexico, it ends its course in the Gulf of California. Its early career is uneventful. In its youth it bears a maiden name, and, as the Green river, wends it way joyously through the upper forests. Then it reaches that ghastly country known as the _mauvaises terres_ of Utah and Arizona--a vast region--extending also into Nevada and Wyoming, which, by the ceaseless action of water, has been carried into an intricate labyrinth of deep gloomy caverns.
For a distance of _one thousand miles_ the river winds its tortuous course through these stupendous granite gorges, receiving the waters of many tributary streams, each rushing along similar deeply hewn channels.
In all the range of fiction no adventures can be devised more terrible than those which have actually befallen gold-seekers and hunters who, from any cause, have strayed into this dreary and awesome region. It was first discovered by two bold explorers, by name Strobe and White, who, being attacked by Indians, took refuge in the canyons. Preferring to face unknown dangers to certain death at the hands of the enemy, they managed to collect enough timber to construct a rude raft, and determined to attempt the descent.
Once embarked on that awful journey, there was no returning--they must endure to the bitter end.
On the fourth day the raft was upset. Strobe was drowned, and the little store of provisions and ammunition was lost. White contrived to right the raft, and for ten days the rushing waters bore him down the frightful chasm, seeing only the perpendicular cliffs on either side, and the strip of sky far overheard--never knowing, from hour to hour, but that at the next winding of the canyon the stream might overleap some mighty precipice, and so end his long anguish. During those awful ten days of famine, a few leaves and seed-pods, clutched from the bushes on the rocks, were his only food.
At length he reached a wretched settlement of half-bred Mexicans, who, deeming his escape miraculous, fed him; and eventually he reached the homes of white men, who looked on him (as well they might) as on one returned from the grave. The life thus wonderfully saved, was, however, sacrificed a few months later, when he fell into the hands of his old Indian foes.
The story of White’s adventure was confirmed by various trappers and prospectors, who, from time to time, ventured some little way into this mysterious rock-labyrinth; and it was determined to attempt a government survey of the region. Accordingly, in 1869, a party, commanded by Major J. W. Powell, started on this most interesting but dangerous expedition. Warned by the fate of a party who attempted to explore the country in 1855, and who, with the exception of two men (Ashley and another), all perished miserably, the government party started with all possible precautions.
[Illustration: THE GRAND CAÑON OF THE COLORADO.]
Four light Chicago-built boats were provisioned for six months, and, with infinite difficulty, were transported 1,500 miles across the desert. On reaching their starting-point, they were lowered into the awful ravines, from which it was, to say the least, problematic whether all would emerge alive. The dangers, great enough in reality, had been magnified by rumour. It was reported, with every semblance of probability, that the river formed terrible whirlpools--that it flowed underground for hundreds of miles, and emerged only to fall in mighty cataracts and appalling rapids. Even the friendly Indians entreated the explorers not to attempt so rash an enterprise, assuring them that none who embarked on that stream would escape alive.
But in the face of all such counsel, the expedition started, and for upwards of three months the party travelled, one may almost say in the bowels of the earth--at least in her deepest furrows--through canyons where the cliffs rise, sheer from the water, to a height of three-quarters of a mile!
They found, as was only natural, that imagination had exaggerated the horrors of the situation, and that it was possible to follow the rock-girt course of the Colorado through all its wanderings--not without danger, of course. In many places the boat had to be carried. One was totally wrecked and its cargo lost, and the others came to
## partial grief, entailing the loss of valuable instruments, and almost
more precious lives. Though no subterranean passage was discovered, nor any actual waterfall, there were, nevertheless, such dangerous rapids as to necessitate frequent troublesome portage; and altogether, the expedition had its full share of adventure.
The ground was found to vary considerably. In some places the rock is so vivid in colour--red and orange--that the canyons were distinguished as the Red Canyon and the Flaming Gorge. Some are mere fissures of tremendous depth; while in other places, where the water has carved its way more freely, they are broad, here and there expanding into a fertile oasis, where green turf and lovely groves are enclosed by stupendous crags--miniature Yosemites--which to these travellers appeared to be indeed visions of Paradise.
_Granite Crags_ (Edinburgh and London, 1884).
THE ROCK OF GIBRALTAR
(_SPAIN_)
AUGUSTUS J. C. HARE
It was a lovely day, and a calm sea, which was a great subject of rejoicing, for even as it was the rickety Spanish vessel rolled disagreeably. Owing to the miserable slowness of everything, we were eleven hours on board. There was little interest till we reached the yellow headland of Trafalgar. Then the rugged outlines of the African coast rose before us, and we entered the straits, between Tarifa sleeping amid its orange groves on the Spanish coast, and the fine African peak above Ceuta. Soon, on the left, the great rock of Gibraltar rose from the sea like an island, though not the most precipitous side, which turns inwards towards the Mediterranean. But it was already gun-fire, and too late to join another steamer and land at the town, so we waited for a shoal of small boats which put out from Algeciras, and surrounded our steamer to carry us on shore.
Here we found in the Fonda Inglesa (kept by an English landlady), one of the most primitive but charming little hotels we ever entered. The view from our rooms alone decided us to stay there some days. Hence, framed by the balcony, Gibraltar rose before us in all the glory of its rugged sharp-edged cliffs, grey in the morning, pink in the evening light, with the town at its foot, whence, at night, thousands of lights were reflected on the still water. In the foreground were groups of fishing-boats at anchor, and, here and there, a lateen sail flitted, like a white albatross, across the bay. On the little pier beneath us was endless life and movement, knots of fishermen, in their blue shirts and scarlet caps and sashes, mingling with solemn-looking Moors in turbans, yellow slippers, and flowing burnouses, who were watching the arrival or embarcation of their wares; and an endless variety of travellers from all parts of Europe, waiting for different steamers, or come over to see the place. Here an invalid might stay, imbibing health from the fine air and sunshine, and never be weary of the ever changing diorama. In every direction delightful walks wind along the cliffs through groves of aloes and prickly-pear, or descend into little sandy coves full of beautiful shells. Behind the town, a fine old aqueduct strides across the valley, and beyond it the wild moors begin at once sweeping backwards to a rugged chain of mountains. Into the gorges of these mountains we rode one day, and most delightful they are, clothed in parts with magnificent old cork-trees, while in the depths of a ravine, overhung with oleander and rhododendron, is a beautiful waterfall.
[Illustration: THE ROCK OF GIBRALTAR.]
It was with real regret that we left Algeciras and made the short voyage across the bay to Gibraltar, where we instantly found ourselves in a place as unlike Spain as it is possible to imagine. Upon the wharf you are assailed by a clamour of English-speaking porters and boatmen. Passing the gates, you come upon a barrack-yard swarming with tall British soldiers, looking wonderfully bright and handsome, after the insignificant figures and soiled, shabby uniforms of the Spanish army. Hence the Waterport Street opens, the principal thoroughfare of the town, though from its insignificant shops, with English names, and its low public-houses, you have to look up at the strip of bright blue sky above, to be reminded that you are not in an English seaport.
Just outside the principal town, between it and the suburb of Europe, is the truly beautiful Alameda, an immense artificial garden, where endless gravel paths wind through labyrinths of geraniums and coronella and banks of flame-coloured ixia, which are all in their full blaze of beauty under the March sun, though the heat causes them to wither and droop before May. During our stay at Gibraltar, it has never ceased to surprise us that this Alameda, the shadiest and pleasantest place open to the public upon the Rock, should be almost deserted; but so it is. Even when the band playing affords an additional attraction, there are not a dozen persons to listen to it; whereas at Rome on such occasions, the Pincio, exceedingly inferior as a public garden, would be crowded to suffocation, and always presents a lively and animated scene.
One succession of gardens occupies the western base of the Rock, and most luxuriant and gigantic are the flowers that bloom in them. Castor-oil plants, daturas, and daphnes, here attain the dignity of timber, while geraniums and heliotropes many years old, so large as to destroy all the sense of floral proportions which has hitherto existed in your mind. It is a curious characteristic, and typical of Gibraltar, that the mouth of a cannon is frequently found protruding from a thicket of flowers.
The eastern side of the Rock, in great part a perpendicular precipice, is elsewhere left uncultivated, and is wild and striking in the highest degree. Here, beyond the quaint Jewish cemetery of closely set gravestones, bearing Hebrew inscriptions on the open hillside, a rugged path winds through rocks and tangled masses of flowers and palmists, to a curious stalactitic cavern called Martin’s Cave. On this side of the cliff a remnant of the famous “apes of Tarshish” is suffered to remain wild and unmolested, though their numbers, always very small, have lately been reduced by the very ignorant folly of a young officer, who shot one and wounded nine others, for which he has been very properly impounded.
On the northern side of the Rock are the famous galleries tunnelled in the face of the precipice, with cannon pointing towards Spain from their embrasures. Through these, or, better, by delightful paths, fringed with palmettos and asphodel, you may reach El Hacho, the signal station, whence the view is truly magnificent over the sea, and the mountain chains of two continents, and down into the blue abysses beneath the tremendous precipice upon which it is placed.
[Illustration: THE ROCK OF GIBRALTAR.]
The greatest drawback to the charms of Gibraltar has seemed to be the difficulty of leaving it. It is a beautiful prison. We came fully intending to ride over the mountain passes by Ronda, but on arriving we heard that the whole of that district was in the hands of the brigands under the famous chief Don Diego, and the Governor positively refused to permit us to go that way. Our lamentations at this have since been cut short by the news of a double murder at the hands of the brigands on the way we wished to have taken, and at the very time we should have taken it. So we must go to Malaga by sea, and wait for the happy combination of a good steamer and calm weather falling on the same day.
Late in the afternoon of the 15th of March we embarked on board the _Lisbon_ in the dockyard of Gibraltar. It had been a lovely day, and the grand Rock had looked its best, its every cleft filled with flowers and foliage. The sun set before we had rounded Europe Point, and the precipitous cliffs of the eastern bay rose utterly black against the yellow sky.
_Wanderings in Spain_ (London, 1873).
THINGVALLA
(_ICELAND_)
LORD DUFFERIN
At last I have seen the famous Geysers, of which every one has heard so much; but I have also seen Thingvalla, of which no one has heard anything. The Geysers are certainly wonderful marvels of nature, but more wonderful, more marvellous is Thingvalla; and if the one repay you for crossing the Spanish Sea, it would be worth while to go round the world to reach the other.
Of the boiling fountains I think I can give you a good idea, but whether I can contrive to draw for you anything like a comprehensible picture of the shape and nature of the Almanna Gja, the Hrafna Gja, and the lava vale, called Thingvalla, that lies between them, I am doubtful. Before coming to Iceland I had read every account that had been written of Thingvalla by any former traveller, and when I saw it, it appeared to me a place of which I had never heard; so I suppose I shall come to grief in as melancholy a manner as my predecessors, whose ineffectual pages whiten the entrance to the valley they have failed to describe.
After an hour’s gradual ascent through a picturesque ravine, we emerged upon an immense desolate plateau of lava, that stretched away for miles and miles like a great stony sea. A more barren desert you cannot conceive. Innumerable boulders, relics of the glacial period, encumbered the track. We could only go at a foot-pace. Not a blade of grass, not a strip of green, enlivened the prospect, and the only sound we heard was the croak of the curlew and the wail of the plover. Hour after hour we plodded on, but the grey waste seemed interminable, boundless: and the only consolation Sigurdr would vouchsafe was that our journey’s end lay on this side of some purple mountains that peeped like the tents of a demon leaguer above the stony horizon.
As it was already eight o’clock, and we had been told the entire distance from Reykjavik to Thingvalla was only five-and-thirty miles, I could not comprehend how so great a space should still separate us from our destination. Concluding more time had been lost in shooting, lunching, etc., by the way than we supposed, I put my pony into a canter, and determined to make short work of the dozen miles which seemed still to lie between us and the hills, on this side of which I understood from Sigurdr our encampment for the night was to be pitched.
Judge then of my astonishment when, a few minutes afterwards, I was arrested in full career by a tremendous precipice, or rather chasm, which suddenly gaped beneath my feet, and completely separated the barren plateau we had been so painfully traversing from a lovely, gay, sunlit flat, ten miles broad, that lay,--sunk at a level lower by a hundred feet,--between us and the opposite mountains. I was never so completely taken by surprise; Sigurdr’s purposely vague description of our halting-place was accounted for.
We had reached the famous Almanna Gja. Like a black rampart in the distance, the corresponding chasm of the Hrafna Gja cut across the lower sloop of the distant hills, and between them now slept in sunshine and beauty the broad verdant plain[4] of Thingvalla.
Ages ago,--who shall say how long,--some vast commotion shook the foundations of the island, and bubbling up from sources far away amid the inland hills, a fiery deluge must have rushed down between their ridges, until, escaping from the narrow gorges, it found space to spread itself into one broad sheet of molten stone over an entire district of country, reducing its varied surface to one vast blackened level.
One of two things then occurred: either the vitrified mass contracting as it cooled,--the centre area of fifty square miles burst asunder at either side from the adjoining plateau, and sinking down to its present level, left the two paralleled Gjas, or chasms, which form its lateral boundaries, to mark the limits of the disruption; or else, while the pith or marrow of the lava was still in a fluid state, its upper surface became solid, and formed a roof beneath which the molten stream flowed on to lower levels, leaving a vast cavern into which the upper crust subsequently plumped down.
But to return where I left myself, on the edge of the cliff, gazing down with astonished eyes over a panorama of land and water imbedded at my feet. I could scarcely speak for pleasure and surprise; Fitz was equally taken aback, and as for Wilson, he looked as if he thought we had arrived at the end of the world. After having allowed us sufficient time to admire the prospect, Sigurdr turned to the left, along the edge of the precipice, until we reached a narrow pathway accidentally formed down a longitudinal niche in the splintered face of the cliff, which led across the bottom, and up the opposite side of the Gja, into the plain of Thingvalla.
Independently of its natural curiosities, Thingvalla was most interesting to me on account of the historical associations connected with it. Here, long ago, at a period when feudal despotism was the only government known throughout Europe, free parliaments used to sit in peace, and regulate the affairs of the young Republic; and to this hour the precincts of its Commons House of Parliament are as distinct and unchanged as on the day when the high-hearted fathers of the emigration first consecrated them to the service of a free nation. By a freak of nature, as the subsiding plain cracked and shivered into twenty thousand fissures, an irregular oval area, of about two hundred feet by fifty, was left almost entirely surrounded by a crevice so deep and broad as to be utterly impassable;--at one extremity alone a scanty causeway connected it with the adjoining level, and allowed of access to its interior. It is true, just at one point the encircling chasm grows so narrow as to be within the possibility of a jump; and an ancient worthy, named Flosi, pursued by his enemies, did actually take it at a fly: but as leaping an inch short would have entailed certain drowning in the bright green waters that sleep forty feet below, you can conceive there was never much danger of this entrance becoming a thoroughfare. I confess that for one moment, while contemplating the scene of Flosi’s exploit, I felt, like a true Briton,--an idiotic desire to be able to say that I had done the same;--that I survive to write this letter is a proof of my having come subsequently to my senses.