Part 16

The plateau of pitch now widened out, and the whole ground looked like an asphalt pavement, half overgrown with marsh-loving weeds, whose roots feed in the sloppy water which overlies the pitch. But, as yet, there was no sign of the lake. The incline, though gentle, shuts off the view of what is beyond. This last lip of the lake has surely overflowed, and is overflowing still, though very slowly. Its furrows all curve downward; and, it is, in fact, as one of our party said, “a black glacier.” The pitch, expanding under the burning sun of day, must needs expand most towards the line of least resistance, that is, down hill; and when it contracts again under the coolness of night, it contracts surely from the same cause, more downhill than it does uphill; so that each particle never returns to the spot whence it started, but rather drags the particles above it downward towards itself. At least, so it seemed to us.

At last we surmounted the last rise, and before us lay the famous lake--not at the bottom of a depression, as we expected, but at the top of a rise, whence the ground slopes away from it on two sides, and rises from it very slightly on the two others. The black pool glared and glittered in the sun. A group of islands, some twenty yards wide, were scattered about the middle of it. Beyond it rose a noble forest of Moriche fan-palms; and to the right of them high wood with giant Mombins and undergrowth of Cocorite--a paradise on the other side of the Stygian pool.

We walked, with some misgivings, on to the asphalt, and found it perfectly hard. In a few yards we were stopped by a channel of clear water, with tiny fish and water-beetles in it; and, looking round, saw that the whole lake was intersected with channels, so unlike anything which can be seen elsewhere, that it is not easy to describe them.

Conceive a crowd of mushrooms, of all shapes from ten to fifty feet across, close together side by side, their tops being kept at exactly the same level, their rounded rims squeezed tight against each other; then conceive water poured on them so as to fill the parting seams, and in the wet season, during which we visited it, to overflow the tops somewhat. Thus would each mushroom represent, tolerably well, one of the innumerable flat asphalt bosses, which seem to have sprung up each from a separate centre.

In five minutes we had seen, handled, and smelt enough to satisfy us with this very odd and very nasty vagary of tropic nature; and as we did not wish to become faint or ill, between the sulphuretted hydrogen and the blaze of the sun reflected off-the hot black pitch, we hurried on over the water-furrows, and through the sedge-beds to the further shore--to find ourselves in a single step out of an Inferno into a Paradise.

We looked back at the foul place, and agreed that it is well for the human mind that the Pitch Lake was still unknown when Dante wrote that hideous poem of his--the opprobrium (as I hold) of the Middle Age. For if such were the dreams of its noblest and purest genius, what must have been the dreams of the ignoble and impure multitude? But had he seen this lake, how easy, how tempting too, it would have been to him to embody in imagery the surmise of a certain “Father,” and heighten the torments of the lost being, sinking slowly into that black Bolge beneath the baking rays of the tropic sun, by the sight of the saved, walking where we walked, beneath cool fragrant shade, among the pillars of a temple to which the Parthenon is mean and small.

Sixty feet and more aloft, the short, smooth columns of the Moriches towered around us, till, as we looked through the “pillared shade,” the eye was lost in the green abysses of the forest. Overhead, their great fan-leaves form a grooved roof, compared with which that of St. Mary Radcliff, or even of King’s College, is as clumsy as all man’s works are beside the works of God; and beyond the Moriche wood, ostrich plumes packed close round madder-brown stems, formed a wall to our temple, which bore such tracery, carving, and painting, as would have stricken dumb with awe and delight him who ornamented the Loggie of the Vatican.

What might not have been made, with something of justice and mercy, common sense and humanity, of these gentle Arawaks and Guaraons. What was made of them, almost ere Columbus was dead, may be judged from this one story, taken from Las Casas.

“There was a certain man named Juan Bono, who was employed by the members of the Andencia of St. Domingo to go and obtain Indians. He and his men to the number of fifty or sixty, landed on the Island of Trinidad. Now the Indians of Trinidad were a mild, loving, credulous race, the enemies of the Caribs, who ate human flesh. On Juan Bono’s landing, the Indians armed with bows and arrows, went to meet the Spaniards, and to ask them who they were, and what they wanted. Juan Bono replied that his men were good and peaceful people, who had come to live with the Indians; upon which, as the commencement of good fellowship, the natives offered to build houses for the Spaniards. The Spanish captain expressed a wish to have one large house built. The accommodating Indians set about building it. It was to be in the form of a bell and to be large enough for a hundred persons to live in. On any great occasion it would hold many more.... Upon a certain day Juan Bono collected the Indians together--men, women, and children--in the building ‘to see,’ as he told them, ‘what was to be done.’... A horrible massacre ensued....”

Such was the fate of the poor gentle folk who for unknown ages had swung their hammocks to the stems of these Moriches, spinning the skin of the young leaves into twine, and making sago from the pith, and then wine from the sap and fruit, while they warned their children not to touch the nests of the humming-birds, which even till lately swarmed around the lake. For--so the Indian story ran--once on a time a tribe of Chaymas built their palm-leaf ajoupas upon the very spot, where the lake now lies, and lived a merry life. The sea swarmed with shell-fish and turtle, and the land with pine-apples; the springs were haunted by countless flocks of flamingoes and horned screamers, pajuis and blue ramiers; and, above all, by humming-birds. But the foolish Chaymas were blind to the mystery and beauty of the humming-birds, and would not understand how they were no other than the souls of dead Indians, translated into living jewels; and so they killed them in wantonness, and angered “The Good Spirit.” But one morning, when the Guaraons came by, the Chayma village had sunk deep into the earth, and in its place had risen this Lake of Pitch. So runs the tale, told forty years since to Mr. Joseph, author of a clever little history of Trinidad, by an old half-caste Indian, Señor Trinidada by name, who was said then to be nigh one hundred years of age. Surely the people among whom such a myth could spring up, were worthy of a nobler fate.

_At Last_ (London and New York, 1871).

THE LACHINE RAPIDS

(_CANADA_)

DOUGLAS SLADEN

From St. Anne’s to Lachine is not such a very far cry, and it was at Lachine that the great La Salle had his first seigniory. This Norman founder of Illinois, who reared on the precipices of Fort St. Louis the white flag and his great white cross nearly a couple of centuries before the beginnings of the Metropolis of the West, made his beginnings at his little seigniory round Fort Remy, on the Island of Montreal.

The son of a wealthy and powerful burgher of Rouen, he had been brought up to become a Jesuit. La Salle was well fitted for an ecclesiastic, a prince of the Church, a Richelieu, but not for a Jesuit, whose effacement of self is the keystone of the order. To be one step, one stone in the mighty pyramid of the Order of Jesus was not for him, a man of mighty individuality like Columbus or Cromwell, and accordingly his piety, asceticism, vast ambition, and superhuman courage were lost to the Church and gained to the State. So says Parkman....

[Illustration: THE LACHINE RAPIDS.]

His seigniory and fort--probably the Fort Remy of which a contemporary plan has come down to us--were just where the St. Lawrence begins to widen into Lake St. Louis, abreast of the famous Rapids of Lachine, shot by so many tourists with blanched cheeks every summer. I say tourists, for, as I have said before, there is nothing your true Canadian loves so much as the off-chance of being drowned in a cataract or “splifficated” on a toboggan slide. It is part of the national education, like the Bora Bora, or teeth-drawing, of the Australian aborigines. The very name Lachine breathes a memory of La Salle, for it was so christened in scorn by his detractors--the way by which La Salle thinks he is going to get to China. A palisade containing, at any rate, the house of La Salle, a stone mill still standing, and a stone barrack and ammunition house, now falling into most picturesque and pitfallish decay--such is Fort Remy, founded nearly two centuries and a quarter ago, when England was just beginning to feel the invigorating effects of a return to the blessings of Stuart rule. This was in 1667, but La Salle was not destined to remain here long. In two years’ time he had learned seven or eight Indian languages, and felt himself ready for the ambition of his life: to find his way to the Vermilion Sea--the Gulf of California--for a short cut to the wealth of China and Japan,--an ambition which resolved itself into founding a province or Colonial Empire for France at the mouth of the Mississippi, when he discovered later on that the Mississippi flowed into the Gulf of Mexico and not into the Gulf of California.

We cannot follow him in his long connection with the Illinois Indians and Fort St. Louis. We must leave him gazing from the walls of his seigniory across the broad bosom of Lake St. Louis at the forests of Beauharnais and Chateauguay (destined afterwards to be Canada’s Thermopylæ) and the sunset, behind which must be a new passage to the South Seas and the treasures of Cathay and Cipango--the dream which had fired the brain of every discoverer from Columbus and Vasco Nuñez downwards.

Nowadays Lachine suggests principally the canal by which the rapids are avoided, the rapids themselves, and the superb Canadian Pacific Railway Bridge, which is a link in the realization of La Salle’s vast idea. Hard by, too, the St. Lawrence opens out into the expanse of Lake St. Louis, dear to Montreallers in the glowing Canadian summer. Seen from the bank, the rapids are most disappointing to people who expect them to look like Niagara. Seen from the deck of the steamer which runs in connection with the morning and evening train from Montreal, they make the blood of the novice creep, though the safety of the trip is evinced by the fact that it is no longer considered necessary to take a pilot from the neighbouring Indian village of Caughnawaga. It is said that, if the steamer is abandoned to the current, it is impossible for her to strike, the scour being so strong; certainly, her engines are slowed; she reels about like a drunken man; right and left you see fierce green breakers with hissing white fillets threatening to swamp you at every minute. Every second thud of these waves upon the sides convinces you that the ship is aground and about to be dashed to pieces. There seems absolutely no chance of getting safely out of the boiling waters, which often rush together like a couple of fountains. Yet, after a few trips, you know that the Captain is quite justified in sitting in his easy chair and smoking a cigarette all through it. It is admirably described in brief by Dawson: “As the steamer enters the long and turbulent rapids of the Sault St. Louis, the river is contracted and obstructed by islands; and trap dykes, crossing the softer limestone rocks, make, by their uneven wear, a very broken bottom. The fall of the river is also considerable, and the channel tortuous, all which circumstances combined cause this rapid to be more feared than any of the others.

“As the steamer enters the rapids the engines are slowed, retaining a sufficient speed to give steerage way, and, rushing along with the added speed of the swift current, the boat soon begins to labour among the breakers and eddies. The passengers grow excited at the apparently narrow escapes, as the steamer seems almost to touch rock after rock, and dips her prow into the eddies, while the turbulent waters throw their spray over the deck.”

_On the Cars and Off_ (London, New York and Melbourne, 1895).

LAKE ROTORUA

(_NEW ZEALAND_)

H. R. HAWEIS

The thermæ, or hot baths, of the near future are without doubt the marvellous volcanic springs of Rotorua and the Lake Taupo district, in the North Island. They can now be reached from London, _via_ Francisco, in thirty-three days. They concentrate in a small area all the varied qualities of the European springs, and other curative properties of an extraordinary character, which are not possessed in the same degree by any other known waters. Before Mr. Froude’s _Oceana_, and the subsequent destruction of the famous pink terraces, little attention had been called to one of the most romantic and amazing spectacles in the world. The old terraces are indeed gone. The idyllic villages, the blossoming slopes are a waste of volcanic ashes and scoriæ through which the dauntless vegetation is only now beginning to struggle. The blue waters are displaced and muddy, but the disaster of one shock could not rob the land of its extraordinary mystery and beauty. For a distance of three hundred miles, south of Lake Taupo and running north, a volcanic crust, sometimes thin enough to be trodden through, separates the foot from a seething mass of sulphur, gas, and boiling water, which around Rotorua and Waikari finds strange and ample vents, in hot streams, clouds of vapour, warm lakes, geysers, occasionally developing into appalling volcanic outbursts, which certainly invest this region with a weird terror, but also with an inconceivable charm, as white vapour breaks amidst flowering bushes, in the midst of true valleys of paradise; the streams ripple hot and crystalline over

## parti-coloured rocks or through emerald-hued mossy dells; the warm

lakes sleep embedded in soft, weedy banks, reflecting huge boulders, half clothed in tropical foliage; coral-like deposits here and there of various tints reproduce the famous terraces in miniature; and geysers, in odd moments, spout huge volumes of boiling water with an unearthly roar eighty feet into the air. At Waikari, near Lake Taupo, specimens of all these wonders are concentrated in a few square miles--the bubbling white mud pools, like foaming plaster of Paris, the petrifying springs, into which a boy fell some time ago, and getting a good silicate coat over him was taken out months afterwards “as good as ever,” so my guide explained.

[Illustration: LAKE ROTORUA.]

“What,” I said, “did he not feel even a little poorly?”

“What’s that?” said the guide, and the joke dawning on him burst into a tardy roar.

And time would fail me to tell of the dragon’s mouth, and open rock vomiting sulphur and steam; the lightning pool, in whose depths for ever flash queer opaline subaqueous flashes; the champagne pool, the Prince of Wales’s Feathers, a geyser which can be made to play half an hour after a few clods of mud have blocked up a little hot stream; the steam hammer, the fairy bath, the donkey engine, etc.

At Rotorua we bought blocks of soap and threw them in to make a certain big geyser spout. The Maoris have still the monopoly there; you pay toll, cross a rickety bridge with a Maori girl as guide, and then visit the pools, terraces, and boiling fountains. They are not nearly so picturesque as at Waikari, which is a wilderness of blossoming glens, streams, and wooded vales. But you see the Maori in his native village.

The volcanic crust is warm to the feet; the Maori huts of “toitoi” reeds and boards are all about; outside are warm pools; naked boys and girls are swimming in them; as we approach they emerge half out of the water; we throw them threepenny bits. The girls seem most eager and dive best--one cunning little girl about twelve or thirteen, I believe, caught her coin each time under water long before it sank, but throwing up her legs half out of water dived deep, pretending to fetch it up from the bottom. Sometimes there was a scramble under water for the coin; the girls generally got it; the boys seemed half lazy. We passed on.

“Here is the brain pot,” said our Maori belle; a hollowed stone. It was heated naturally--the brains cooked very well there in the old days--not very old days either.

“Here is the bread oven.” She drew off the cloth, and sure enough in a hole in the hot ground there were three new loaves getting nicely browned. “Here are potatoes,” and she pointed to a little boiling pool, and the potatoes were nearly done; and “here is meat,”--a tin let into the earth, that was all, contained a joint baking; and farther on was a very good stew--at least, it being one o’clock, it smelt well enough. And so there is no fuel and no fire wanted in this and dozens of other Maori pahs or hamlets. In the cold nights the Maoris come out of their tents naked, and sit or even sleep in the hot shallow lakelets and pools hard by. Anything more uncanny than this walk through the Rotorua Geyser village can hardly be conceived. The best springs are rented from the Maoris by the Government, or local hotel-keepers. These are now increasingly fashionable bathing resorts. The finest bath specific for rheumatism is the Rachel bath, investing the body with a soft, satiny texture, and a pearly complexion; the iron, sulphur, and especially the oil bath, from which when you emerge you have but to shake yourself dry. But the Priest’s bath, so called from the discoverer, Father Mahoney--who cured himself of obstinate rheumatism--is perhaps of all the most miraculous in its effects, and there are no two opinions about it. Here take place the most incredible cures of sciatica, gout, lumbago, and all sorts of rheumatic affections. It is simply a question of fact.

The Countess of Glasgow herself told me about the cure of a certain colonel relative or aide-de-camp of the Governor, the Earl of Glasgow. The Colonel had for years been a perfect martyr to rheumatism and gout. He went to Rotorua with his swollen legs and feet, and came away wearing tight boots, and “as good as ever,” as my guide would have said. But indeed I heard of scores of similar cases. Let all victims who can afford it lay it well to heart. A pleasure trip, of only thirty-two days, changing saloon rail carriage but three times, and steamer cabins but twice, will insure them an almost infallible cure, even when chronically diseased and no longer young. This is no “jeujah” affair. I have seen and spoken to the fortunate _beneficiares_--you meet them all over New Zealand. Of course, the fame of the baths is spreading: the region is only just made accessible by the opening of the railway from Auckland to Rotorua--a ten hours’ run. The Waikari and Taupo baths are very similar, and the situation is infinitely more romantic, but the Government, on account of the railway, are pushing the Rotorua baths.

I stole out about half-past ten at night; it was clear and frosty. I made my way to a warm lake at the bottom of the hotel grounds, a little shed and a tallow candle being the only accommodation provided. Anything more weird than that starlight bath I never experienced. I stepped in the deep night from the frosty bank into a temperature of about 80°.

It was a large shallow lake. I peered into the dark, but I could not see its extent by the dim starlight; no, not even the opposite banks. I swam about until I came to the margin--a mossy, soft margin. Dark branches of trees dipped in the water, and I could feel the fallen leaves floating about. I followed the margin round till the light in my wood cabin dwindled to a mere spark in the distance, then I swam out into the middle of the lake. When I was upright the warm water reached my chin; beneath my feet seemed to be fine sand and gravel. Then leaning my head back I looked up at the Milky Way, and all the expanse of the starlit heavens. There was not a sound; the great suns and planets hung like golden balls above me in the clear air. The star dust of planetary systems--whole universes--stretched away bewilderingly into the unutterable void of boundless immensity, mapping out here and there the trackless thoroughfares of God in the midnight skies. “_Dont la poussière_,” as Lamartine finely writes in oft-plagiarised words, “_sont les Étoiles qui remontent et tombent devant Lui_.”

How long I remained there absorbed in this super-mundane contemplation I cannot say. I felt myself embraced simultaneously by three elements--the warm water, the darkness, and the starlit air. They wove a threefold spell about my senses, whilst my intellect seemed detached, free. Emancipated from earthly trammels, I seemed mounting up and up towards the stars. Suddenly I found myself growing faint, luxuriously faint. My head sank back, my eyes closed, there was a humming as of some distant waterfall in my ears. I seemed falling asleep, pillowed on the warm water, but common sense rescued me just in time. I was alone in an unknown hot lake in New Zealand at night, out of reach of human call. I roused myself with a great effort of will. I had only just time to make for the bank when I grew quite dizzy. The keen frosty air brought me unpleasantly to my senses. My tallow dip was guttering in its socket, and hastily resuming my garments, in a somewhat shivering condition, I retraced the rocky path, then groped my way over the little bridge under which rushed the hot stream that fed the lakelet, and guided only by the dim starlight I regained my hotel.

I had often looked up at the midnight skies before--at Charles’s Wain and the Pleiades on the Atlantic, at the Southern Cross on the Pacific, and the resplendent Milky Way in the Tropics, at Mars and his so-called canals, at “the opal widths of the moon” from the snowy top of Mount Cenis, but never, no, never had I studied astronomy under such extraordinary circumstances and with such peculiar and enchanted environments as on this night at the Waikari hot springs.

_Travel and Talk_ (London and New York, 1896).

THE BIG TREES OF CALIFORNIA

(_UNITED STATES_)

C. F. GORDON-CUMMING