THE GOLDEN HORN
(TURKEY)
ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE
The land breeze begins to rise, and we make use of it to approach nearer and nearer to the Dardanelles. Already several large ships, which like us are trying to make this difficult entrance, come near us; their large grey sails, like the wings of night-birds, glide silently between our brig and Tenedos; I go down below and fall asleep.
Break of day: I hear the rapid sailing of vessels and the little morning waves that sound around the sides of the brig like the song of birds; I open the port-hole, and I see on a chain of low and rounded hills the castles of the Dardanelles with their white walls, their towers, and their immense mouths for the cannon; the canal is scarcely more than a league in width at this place; it winds, like a beautiful river, between the exactly similar coasts of Asia and Europe. The castles shut in this sea just like the two wings of a door; but in the present condition of Turkey and Europe, it would be easy to force a passage by sea, or to make a landing and take the forts from the rear; the passage of the Dardanelles is not impregnable unless guarded by the Russians.
The rapid current carries us on like an arrow before Gallipoli and the villages bordering the canal; we see the isles in the Sea of Marmora frowning before us; we follow the coast of Europe for two days and two nights, thwarted by the north winds. In the morning we perceive perfectly the isles of the princes, in the Sea of Marmora, and the Gulf of Nicæa, and on our left the castle of the Seven Towers, and the aërial tops of the innumerable minarets of Stamboul, in front of the seven hills of Constantinople. At each tack, we discover something new. At the first view of Constantinople, I experienced a painful emotion of surprise and disillusion. “What! is this,” I asked myself, “the sea, the shore, and the marvellous city for which the masters of the world abandoned Rome and the coast of Naples? Is this that capital of the universe, seated upon Europe and Asia; for which all the conquering nations disputed by turns as the sign of the supremacy of the world? Is this the city that painters and poets imagine queen of cities seated upon her hills and her twin seas; enclosed by her gulfs, her towers, her mountains, and containing all the treasures of nature and the luxury of the Orient?” It is here that one makes comparison with the Bay of Naples bearing its white city upon its hollowed bosom like a vast amphitheatre; with Vesuvius losing its golden brow in the clouds of smoke and purple lights, the forest of Castellamare plunging its black foliage into the blue sea, and the islands of Procida and Ischia with their volcanic peaks yellow with vine-branches and white with villas, shutting in the immense bay like gigantic moles thrown up by God himself at the entrance of this port? I see nothing here to compare to that spectacle with which my eyes are always enchanted; I am sailing, it is true, upon a beautiful and lovely sea, but from the low coasts, rounded and monotonous hills rear themselves; it is true that the snows of Olympus of Thrace whiten the horizon, but they are only a white cloud in the sky and do not make the landscape solemn enough. At the back of the gulf I see nothing but the same rounded hills of the same height without rocks, without coves, without indentations, and Constantinople, which the pilot points out with his finger, is nothing but a white and circumscribed city upon a large knoll on the European coast. Is it worth while having come so far to be disenchanted? I did not wish to look at it any longer; however, the ceaseless tackings of the ship brought us sensibly nearer; we coasted along the castle of the Seven Towers, an immense mediæval grey block, severe in construction, which faces the sea at the angle of the Greek walls of the ancient Byzantium, and we came to anchor beneath the houses of Stamboul in the Sea of Marmora, in the midst of a host of ships and boats delayed like ourselves from port by the violence of the north winds. It was five o’clock, the sky was serene and the sun brilliant; I began to recover from my disdain of Constantinople; the walls that enclosed this portion of the city picturesquely built of the débris of ancient walls and surmounted by gardens, kiosks and little houses of wood painted red, formed the foreground of the picture; above, the terraces of numerous houses rose in pyramid-like tiers, story upon story, cut across with the tops of orange-trees and the sharp, black spires of cypress; higher still, seven or eight large mosques crowned the hill, and, flanked by their open-work minarets and their mauresque colonnades, lifted into the sky their gilded domes, flaming with the palpitating sunlight; the walls, painted with tender blue, the leaden covers of the cupolas that encircled them, gave them the appearance and the transparent glaze of monuments of porcelain. The immemorial cypresses lend to these domes their motionless and sombre peaks; and the various tints of the painted houses of the city make the vast hill gay with all the colours of a flower-garden. No noise issues from the streets; no lattice of the innumerable windows opens; no movement disturbs the habitation of such a great multitude of men: everything seems to be sleeping under the broiling sunlight; the gulf, furrowed in every direction with sails of all forms and sizes, alone gives signs of life. Every moment we see vessels in full sail clear the Golden Horn (the opening of the Bosphorus), the true harbour of Constantinople, passing by us flying towards the Dardanelles; but we can not perceive the entrance of the Bosphorus, nor even understand its position. We dine on the deck opposite this magical spectacle; Turkish caïques come to question us and to bring us provisions and food; the boatmen tell us that there is no longer any plague; I send my letters to the city; at seven o’clock, M. Truqui, the consul-general of Sardaigne, accompanied by officers of his legation, comes to pay us a visit and offer us the hospitality of his house in Pera; there is not the slightest hope of finding a lodging in the recently burned city; the obliging cordiality, and the attraction that M. Truqui inspires at the first moment, induces us to accept. The contrary wind still blows, and the brigs cannot raise anchor this evening: we sleep on board.
THE GOLDEN HORN.
At five o’clock I am standing on the deck; the captain lowers a boat; I descend with him, and we set sail towards the mouth of the Bosphorus, coasting along the walls of Constantinople, which the sea washes. After half an hour’s navigation through a multitude of ships at anchor, we reach the walls of the Seraglio, which stand next to those of the city, and form, at the extremity of the hill that bears Stamboul, the angle that separates the Sea of Marmora from the canal of the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn, or the grand inner roadstead of Constantinople. It is here that God and man, nature and art, have placed, or created, in concert the most marvellous view that human eyes may contemplate upon the earth. I gave an involuntary cry, and I forgot for ever the Bay of Naples and all its enchantments; to compare anything to this magnificent and gracious combination would be to insult creation.
The walls supporting the circular terraces of the immense gardens of the great Seraglio were a few feet from us to our left, separated from the sea by a narrow sidewalk of stone flags washed by the ceaseless billows, where the perpetual current of the Bosphorus formed little murmuring waves, as blue as those of the Rhône at Geneva; these terraces that rise in gentle inclines up to the Sultan’s palace, where you perceive the gilded domes across the gigantic tops of the plantain-trees and the cypresses, are themselves planted with enormous cypresses and plantains whose trunks dominate the walls and whose boughs, spreading beyond the garden, hang over the sea in cascades of foliage shadowing the caïques; the rowers stop from time to time beneath their shade; every now and then these groups of trees are interrupted by palaces, pavilions, kiosks, doors sculptured and gilded opening upon the sea, or batteries of cannon of copper and bronze in ancient and peculiar shapes.
Several pulls of the oar brought us to the precise point of the Golden Horn where you enjoy at once a view of the Bosphorus, the Sea of Marmora, and, finally, of the entire harbour, or, rather, the inland sea of Constantinople; there we forgot Marmora, the coast of Asia, and the Bosphorus, taking in with one glance the basin of the Golden Horn and the seven cities seated upon the seven hills of Constantinople, all converging towards the arm of the sea that forms the unique and incomparable city, that is at the same time city, country, sea, harbour, bank of flowers, gardens, wooded mountains, deep valleys, an ocean of houses, a swarm of ships and streets, tranquil lakes, and enchanted solitudes,—a view that no brush can render except by details, and where each stroke of the oar gives the eye and soul contradictory aspects and impressions.
We set sail towards the hills of Galata and Pera; the Seraglio receded from us and grew larger in receding in proportion as the eye embraced more and more the vast outlines of its walls and the multitude of its roofs, its trees, its kiosks and its palaces. Of itself it is sufficient to constitute a large city. The harbour hollows itself out more and more before us; it winds like a canal between the flanks of the curved mountains, and increases as we advance. The harbour does not resemble a harbour in the least; it is rather a large river like the Thames, enclosing the two coasts of the hills laden with towns, and covered from one bank to the other with an interminable flotilla of ships variously grouped the entire length of the houses. We pass by this innumerable multitude of boats, some riding at anchor and some about to set sail, sailing before the wind towards the Bosphorus, towards the Black Sea, or towards the Sea of Marmora; boats of all shapes and sizes and flags, from the Arabian barque, whose prow springs and rises like the beak of antique galleys, to the vessel of three decks with its glittering walls of bronze. Some flocks of Turkish caïques, managed by one or two rowers in silken sleeves, little boats that serve as carriages in the maritime streets of this amphibious town, circulate between the large masses, cross and knock against each other without overturning, and jostle one another like a crowd in public places; and clouds of gulls, like beautiful white pigeons, rise from the sea at their approach, to travel further away and be rocked upon the waves. I did not try to count the vessels, the ships, the brigs, the boats of all kinds and the barks that slept or travelled in the harbour of Constantinople, from the mouth of the Bosphorus and the point of the Seraglio to Eyoub and the delicious valleys of sweet waters. The Thames at London offers nothing in comparison. It will suffice to say that independently of the Turkish flotilla and the European men-of-war at anchor in the centre of the canal, the two sides of the Golden Horn are covered two or three vessels deep for about a mile in length. We could only see the ocean by looking between the file of prows and our glance lost itself at the back of the gulf which contracted and ran into the shore amid a veritable forest of masts.
I have just been strolling along the Asian shore on my return this evening to Constantinople, and I find it a thousand times more beautiful than the European shore. The Asian shore owes almost nothing to man; everything here has been accomplished by nature. Here there is no Buyukdere, no Therapia, no palace of ambassadors, and no town of Armenians or Franks; there are only mountains, gorges that separate them, little valleys carpeted with meadows that seem to dig themselves out of the rocks, rivulets that wind about them, cascades that whiten them with their foam, forests that hang to their flanks, glide into their ravines, and descend to the very edges of the innumerable coast gulfs; a variety of forms and tints, and of leafy verdure, which the brush of a landscape-painter could not even hope to suggest. Some isolated houses of sailors or Turkish gardeners are scattered at great distances on the shore, or thrown on the foreground of a wooded hill, or grouped upon the point of rocks where the current carries you, and breaks into waves as blue as the night sky; some white sails of fishermen, who creep along the deep coves, which you see glide from one plane-tree to another, like linen that the washerwomen fold; innumerable flights of white birds that dry themselves on the edge of the meadows; eagles that hover among the heights of the mountains near the sea; mysterious creeks entirely shut in between rocks and trunks of gigantic trees, whose boughs, overcharged with leaves, bend over the waves and form upon the sea cradles wherein the caïques creep. One or two villages hidden in the shadow of these creeks with their gardens behind them on those green slopes, and their group of trees at the foot of the rocks, with their barks rocked by the gentle waves before their doors, their clouds of doves on the roofs, their women and children at the windows, their old men seated beneath the plane-trees at the foot of the minaret; labourers returning from the fields in their caïques; others who have filled their barks with green faggots, myrtle, or flowering heath to dry it for fuel in the winter; hidden behind these heaps of slanting verdure that border and descend into the water, you perceive neither the bark nor the rower, and you believe that a portion of the bank detached from the earth by the current is floating at haphazard on the sea with its green foliage and its perfumed flowers. The shore presents this same appearance as far as the castle of Mahomet II., which from this coast also seems to shut in the Bosphorus like a Swiss lake; there, it changes its character; the hills, less rugged, sink their flanks and more gently hollow into narrow valleys; the Asiatic villages extend more richly and nearer together; the Sweet Waters of Asia, a charming little plain shadowed by trees and sown with kiosks and Moorish fountains opens out to the vision.
Beyond the palace of Beglierby, the Asian coast again becomes wooded and solitary as far as Scutari, which is as brilliant as a garden of roses, at the extremity of a cape at the entrance of the Sea of Marmora. Opposite, the verdant point of the Seraglio presents itself to the eye; and between the European coast, crowned with its three painted towns, and the coast of Stamboul, all glittering with its cupolas and minarets, opens the immense port of Constantinople, where the ships anchored at the two banks leave only one large water-way for the caïques. I glide through this labyrinth of buildings, as in a Venetian gondola under the shadow of palaces, and I land at the échelle des Morts, under an avenue of cypresses.
Voyage en Orient (Paris, 1843).
THE YELLOWSTONE[13]
(UNITED STATES)
RUDYARD KIPLING
“That desolate land and lone
Where the Big Horn and Yellowstone
Roar down their mountain path.”
Twice have I written this letter from end to end. Twice have I torn it up, fearing lest those across the water should say that I had gone mad on a sudden. Now we will begin for the third time quite solemnly and soberly. I have been through the Yellowstone National Park in a buggy, in the company of an adventurous old lady from Chicago and her husband, who disapproved of scenery as being “ongodly.” I fancy it scared them.
COATING SPRINGS, YELLOWSTONE.
We began, as you know, with the Mammoth Hot Springs. They are only a gigantic edition of those pink and white terraces not long ago destroyed by earthquake in New Zealand. At one end of the little valley in which the hotel stands the lime-laden springs that break from the pine-covered hillsides have formed a frozen cataract of white, lemon, and palest pink formations, through and over and in which water of the warmest bubbles and drips and trickles from pale-green lagoon to exquisitely fretted basin. The ground rings hollow as a kerosene-tin, and some day the Mammoth Hotel, guests and all, will sink into the caverns below and be turned into a stalactite. When I set foot on the first of the terraces, a tourist-trampled ramp of scabby grey stuff, I met a steam of iron-red hot water, which ducked into a hole like a rabbit. Followed a gentle chuckle of laughter, and then a deep, exhausted sigh from nowhere in particular. Fifty feet above my head a jet of steam rose up and died out in the blue. It was worse than the boiling mountain at Myanoshita. The dirty white deposit gave place to lime whiter than snow; and I found a basin which some learned hotel-keeper has christened Cleopatra’s pitcher, or Mark Antony’s whisky-jug, or something equally poetical. It was made of frosted silver; it was filled with water as clear as the sky. I do not know the depth of that wonder. The eye looked down beyond grottoes and caves of beryl into an abyss that communicated directly with the central fires of earth. And the pool was in pain, so that it could not refrain from talking about it; muttering and chattering and moaning. From the lips of the lime-ledges, forty feet under water, spurts of silver bubbles would fly up and break the peace of the crystal atop. Then the whole pool would shake and grow dim, and there were noises. I removed myself only to find other pools all equally unhappy, rifts in the ground, full of running red-hot water, slippery sheets of deposit overlaid with greenish grey hot water, and here and there pit-holes dry as a rifled tomb in India, dusty and waterless. Elsewhere the infernal waters had first boiled dead and then embalmed the palms and underwood, or the forest trees had taken heart and smothered up a blind formation with greenery, so that it was only by scraping the earth you could tell what fires had raged beneath. Yet the pines will win the battle in years to come, because Nature, who first forges all her work in her great smithies, has nearly finished this job, and is ready to temper it in the soft brown earth. The fires are dying down; the hotel is built where terraces have overflowed into flat wastes of deposit; the pines have taken possession of the high ground whence the terraces first started. Only the actual curve of the cataract stands clear, and it is guarded by soldiers who patrol it with loaded six-shooters, in order that the tourist may not bring up fence-rails and sink them in a pool, or chip the fretted tracery of the formations with a geological hammer, or, walking where the crust is too thin, foolishly cook himself....
Next dawning, entering a buggy of fragile construction, with the old people from Chicago, I embarked on my perilous career. We ran straight up a mountain till we could see sixty miles away, the white houses of Cook City on another mountain, and the whiplash-like trail leading thereto. The live air made me drunk. If Tom, the driver, had proposed to send the mares in a bee-line to the city, I should have assented, and so would the old lady, who chewed gum and talked about her symptoms. The tub-ended rock-dog, which is but the translated prairie-dog, broke across the road under our horses’ feet, the rabbit and the chipmunk danced with fright; we heard the roar of the river, and the road went round a corner. On one side piled rock and shale, that enjoined silence for fear of a general slide-down; on the other a sheer drop, and a fool of a noisy river below. Then, apparently in the middle of the road, lest any should find driving too easy, a post of rock. Nothing beyond that save the flank of a cliff. Then my stomach departed from me, as it does when you swing, for we left the dirt, which was at least some guarantee of safety, and sailed out round the curve, and up a steep incline, on a plank-road built out from the cliff. The planks were nailed at the outer edge, and did not shift or creak very much—but enough, quite enough. That was the Golden Gate. I got my stomach back again when we trotted out on to a vast upland adorned with a lake and hills. Have you ever seen an untouched land—the face of virgin Nature? It is rather a curious sight, because the hills are choked with timber that has never known an axe, and the storm has rent a way through this timber, so that a hundred thousand trees lie matted together in swathes; and since each tree lies where it falls, you may behold trunk and branch returning to the earth whence they sprang—exactly as the body of man returns—each limb making its own little grave, the grass climbing above the bark, till at last there remains only the outline of a tree upon the rank undergrowth.
Then we drove under a cliff of obsidian, which is black glass, some two hundred feet high; and the road at its foot was made of black glass that crackled. This was no great matter, because half an hour before Tom had pulled up in the woods that we might sufficiently admire a mountain who stood all by himself, shaking with laughter or rage....
Then by companies after tiffin we walked chattering to the uplands of Hell. They call it the Norris Geyser Basin on Earth. It was as though the tide of dissolution had gone out, but would presently return, across innumerable acres of dazzling white geyser formation. There were no terraces here, but all other horrors. Not ten yards from the road a blast of steam shot up roaring every few seconds, a mud volcano spat filth to Heaven, streams of hot water rumbled under foot, plunged through the dead pines in steaming cataracts and died on a waste of white where green-grey, black-yellow, and link pools roared, shouted, bubbled, or hissed as their wicked fancies prompted. By the look of the eye the place should have been frozen over. By the feel of the feet it was warm. I ventured out among the pools, carefully following tracks, but one unwary foot began to sink, a squirt of water followed, and having no desire to descend quick into Tophet I returned to the shore where the mud and the sulphur and the nameless fat ooze-vegetation of Lethe lay. But the very road rang as though built over a gulf; and besides how was I to tell when the raving blast of steam would find its vent insufficient and blow the whole affair into Nirvana? There was a potent stench of stale eggs everywhere, and crystals of sulphur crumbled under the foot, and the glare of the sun on the white stuff was blinding....
We curved the hill and entered a forest of spruce, the path serpentining between the tree-boles, the wheels running silent on immemorial mould. There was nothing alive in the forest save ourselves. Only a river was speaking angrily somewhere to the right. For miles we drove till Tom bade us alight and look at certain falls. Wherefore we stepped out of that forest and nearly fell down a cliff which guarded a tumbled river and returned demanding fresh miracles. If the water had run uphill, we should perhaps have taken more notice of it; but ’twas only a waterfall, and I really forget whether the water was warm or cold. There is a stream here called Firehole River. It is fed by the overflow from the various geysers and basins,—a warm and deadly river wherein no fish breed. I think we crossed it a few dozen times in the course of the day.
Then the sun began to sink, and there was a taste of frost about, and we went swiftly from the forest into the open, dashed across a branch of the Firehole River and found a wood shanty, even rougher than the last, at which, after a forty mile drive, we were to dine and sleep. Half a mile from this place stood, on the banks of the Firehole River a “beaver-lodge,” and there were rumours of bears and other cheerful monsters in the woods on the hill at the back of the building....
Once upon a time there was a carter who brought his team and a friend into the Yellowstone Park without due thought. Presently they came upon a few of the natural beauties of the place, and that carter turned his friend’s team, howling: “Get back o’ this, Tim. All Hell’s alight under our noses.” And they call the place Hell’s Half-acre to this day. We, too, the old lady from Chicago, her husband, Tom, and the good little mares came to Hell’s Half-acre, which is about sixty acres, and when Tom said: “Would you like to drive over it?” we said: “Certainly no, and if you do, we shall report you to the authorities.” There was a plain, blistered and puled and abominable, and it was given over to the sportings and spoutings of devils who threw mud and steam and dirt at each other with whoops and halloos and bellowing curses. The place smelt of the refuse of the Pit, and that odour mixed with the clean, wholesome aroma of the pines in our nostrils throughout the day. Be it known that the Park is laid out, like Ollendorf, in exercises of progressive difficulty. Hell’s Half-acre was a prelude to ten or twelve miles of geyser formation. We passed hot streams boiling in the forest; saw whiffs of steam beyond these, and yet other whiffs breaking through the misty green hills in the far distance; we trampled on sulphur, and sniffed things much worse than any sulphur which is known to the upper world; and so came upon a park-like place where Tom suggested we should get out and play with the geysers.
Imagine mighty green fields splattered with lime beds: all the flowers of the summer growing up to the very edge of the lime. That was the first glimpse of the geyser basins. The buggy had pulled up close to a rough, broken, blistered cone of stuff between ten and twenty feet high. There was trouble in that place—moaning, splashing, gurgling, and the clank of machinery. A spurt of boiling water jumped into the air and a wash of water followed. I removed swiftly. The old lady from Chicago shrieked. “What a wicked waste!” said her husband. I think they call it the Riverside Geyser. Its spout was torn and ragged like the mouth of a gun when a shell has burst there. It grumbled madly for a moment or two and then was still. I crept over the steaming lime—it was the burning marl on which Satan lay—and looked fearfully down its mouth. You should never look a gift geyser in the mouth. I beheld a horrible slippery, slimy funnel with water rising and falling ten feet at a time. Then the water rose to lip level with a rush and an infernal bubbling troubled this Devil’s Bethesda before the sullen heave of the crest of a wave lapped over the edge and made me run. Mark the nature of the human soul! I had begun with awe, not to say terror. I stepped back from the flanks of the Riverside Geyser saying: “Pooh! Is that all it can do?” Yet for aught I knew the whole thing might have blown up at a minute’s notice; she, he, or it, being an arrangement of uncertain temper.
We drifted on up that miraculous valley. On either side of us were hills from a thousand to fifteen feet high and wooded from heel to crest. As far as the eye could range forward were columns of steam in the air, misshapen lumps of lime, most like preadamite monsters, still pools of turquoise blue, stretches of blue cornflowers, a river that coiled on itself twenty times, boulders of strange colours, and ridges of glaring, staring white.
The old lady from Chicago poked with her parasol at the pools as though they had been alive. On one particularly innocent-looking little puddle she turned her back for a moment, and there rose behind her a twenty-foot column of water and steam. Then she shrieked and protested that “she never thought it would ha’ done it,” and the old man chewed his tobacco steadily, and mourned for steam power wasted. I embraced the whitened stump of a middle-sized pine that had grown all too close to a hot pool’s lip, and the whole thing turned over under my hand as a tree would do in a nightmare. From right and left came the trumpetings of elephants at play. I stepped into a pool of old dried blood rimmed with the nodding cornflowers; the blood changed to ink even as I trod; and ink and blood were washed away in a spurt of boiling sulphurous water spat out from the lee of a bank of flowers. This sounds mad, doesn’t it?...
We rounded a low spur of hills, and came out upon a field of aching snowy lime, rolled in sheets, twisted into knots, riven with rents and diamonds and stars, stretching for more than half a mile in every direction. In this place of despair lay most of the big geysers who know when there is trouble in Krakatoa, who tell the pines when there is a cyclone on the Atlantic seaboard, and who—are exhibited to visitors under pretty and fanciful names. The first mound that I encountered belonged to a goblin splashing in his tub. I heard him kick, pull a shower-bath on his shoulders, gasp, crack his joints, and rub himself down with a towel; then he let the water out of the bath, as a thoughtful man should, and it all sank down out of sight till another goblin arrived. Yet they called this place the Lioness and the Cubs. It lies not very far from the Lion, which is a sullen, roaring beast, and they say that when it is very active the other geysers presently follow suit. After the Krakatoa eruption all the geysers went mad together, spouting, spurting, and bellowing till men feared that they would rip up the whole field. Mysterious sympathies exist among them, and when the Giantess speaks (of her more anon) they all hold their peace.
I was watching a solitary spring, when, far across the fields, stood up a plume of spun glass, iridescent and superb against the sky. “That,” said the trooper, “is Old Faithful. He goes off every sixty-five minutes to the minute, plays for five minutes, and sends up a column of water a hundred and fifty feet high. By the time you have looked at all the other geysers he will be ready to play.”
So we looked and we wondered at the Beehive, whose mouth is built up exactly like a hive; at the Turban (which is not in the least like a turban); and at many, many other geysers, hot holes, and springs. Some of them rumbled, some hissed, some went off spasmodically, and others lay still in sheets of sapphire and beryl.
Would you believe that even these terrible creatures have to be guarded by troopers to prevent the irreverent American from chipping the cones to pieces, or worse still, making the geysers sick? If you take of soft-soap a small barrelful and drop it down a geyser’s mouth, that geyser will presently be forced to lay all before you and for days afterwards will be of an irritated and inconsistent stomach. When they told me the tale I was filled with sympathy. Now I wish that I had stolen soap and tried the experiment on some lonely little beast of a geyser in the woods. It sounds so probable—and so human.
Yet he would be a bold man who would administer emetics to the Giantess. She is flat-lipped, having no mouth, she looks like a pool, fifty feet long and thirty wide, and there is no ornamentation about her. At irregular intervals she speaks, and sends up a column of water over two hundred feet high to begin with; then she is angry for a day and a half—sometimes for two days. Owing to her peculiarity of going mad in the night not many people have seen the Giantess at her finest; but the clamour of her unrest, men say, shakes the wooden hotel, and echoes like thunder among the hills. When I saw her; trouble was brewing. The pool bubbled seriously, and at five-minute intervals, sank a foot or two, then rose, washed over the rim, and huge steam bubbles broke on the top. Just before an eruption the water entirely disappears from view. Whenever you see the water die down in a geyser-mouth get away as fast as you can. I saw a tiny little geyser suck in its breath in this way, and instinct made me retire while it hooted after me. Leaving the Giantess to swear, and spit, and thresh about, we went over to Old Faithful, who by reason of his faithfulness has benches close to him whence you may comfortably watch. At the appointed hour we heard the water flying up and down the mouth with the sob of waves in a cave. Then came the preliminary gouts, then a roar and a rush, and that glittering column of diamonds rose, quivered, stood still for a minute; then it broke, and the rest was a confused snarl of water not thirty feet high. All the young ladies—not more than twenty—in the tourist band remarked that it was “elegant,” and betook themselves to writing their names in the bottoms of shallow pools. Nature fixes the insult indelibly, and the after-years will learn that “Hattie,” “Sadie,” “Mamie,” “Sophie,” and so forth, have taken out their hair-pins, and scrawled in the face of Old Faithful....
Next morning Tom drove us on, promising new wonders. He pulled up after a few miles at a clump of brushwood where an army was drowning. I could hear the sick gasps and thumps of the men going under, but when I broke through the brushwood the hosts had fled, and there were only pools of pink, black, and white lime, thick as turbid honey. They shot up a pat of mud every minute or two, choking in the effort. It was an uncanny sight. Do you wonder that in the old days the Indians were careful to avoid the Yellowstone? Geysers are permissible, but mud is terrifying. The old lady from Chicago took a piece of it, and in half an hour it died into lime-dust and blew away between her fingers. All maya—illusion,—you see! Then we clinked over sulphur in crystals; there was a waterfall of boiling water; and a road across a level park hotly contested by the beavers....
As we climbed the long path the road grew viler and viler till it became without disguise, the bed of a torrent; and just when things were at their rockiest we emerged into a little sapphire lake—but never sapphire was so blue—called Mary’s lake; and that between eight and nine thousand feet above the sea. Then came grass downs, all on a vehement slope, so that the buggy following the new-made road ran on to the two off-wheels mostly, till we dipped head-first into a ford, climbed up a cliff, raced along a down, dipped again and pulled up dishevelled at “Larry’s” for lunch and an hour’s rest....
The sun was sinking when we heard the roar of falling waters and came to a broad river along whose banks we ran. And then—oh, then! I might at a pinch describe the infernal regions, but not the other place. Be it known to you that the Yellowstone River has occasion to run through a gorge about eight miles long. To get to the bottom of the gorge it makes two leaps, one of about 120 and the other of 300 feet. I investigated the upper or lesser fall, which is close to the hotel. Up to that time nothing particular happens to the Yellowstone, its banks being only rocky, rather steep, and plentifully adorned with pines. At the falls it comes round a corner, green, solid, ribbed with a little foam, and not more than thirty yards wide. Then it goes over still green and rather more solid than before. After a minute or two you, sitting on a rock directly above the drop, begin to understand that something has occurred; that the river has jumped a huge distance between the solid cliff walls and what looks like the gentle froth of ripples lapping the sides of the gorge below is really the outcome of great waves. And the river yells aloud; but the cliffs do not allow the yells to escape.
That inspection began with curiosity and finished in terror, for it seemed that the whole world was sliding in chrysolite from under my feet. I followed with the others round the corner to arrive at the brink of the cañon; we had to climb up a nearly perpendicular ascent to begin with, for the ground rises more than the river drops. Stately pine woods fringe either lip of the gorge, which is—the Gorge of the Yellowstone.
All I can say is that without warning or preparation I looked into a gulf 1,700 feet deep with eagles and fish-hawks circling far below. And the sides of that gulf were one wild welter of colour—crimson, emerald, cobalt, ochre, amber, honey splashed with port-wine, snow-white, vermilion, lemon, and silver-grey, in wide washes. The sides did not fall sheer, but were graven by time and water and air into monstrous heads of kings, dead chiefs, men and women of the old time. So far below that no sound of its strife could reach us, the Yellowstone River ran—a finger-wide strip of jade-green. The sunlight took these wondrous walls and gave fresh hues to those that nature had already laid there. Once I saw the dawn break over a lake in Rajputana and the sun set over Oodey Sagar amid a circle of Holman Hunt hills. This time I was watching both performances going on below me—upside down you understand—and the colours were real! The cañon was burning like Troy town; but it would not burn forever, and, thank goodness, neither pen nor brush could ever portray its splendours adequately. The Academy would reject the picture for a chromo-lithograph. The public would scoff at the letter-press for Daily Telegraphese. “I will leave this thing alone,” said I; “’tis my peculiar property. Nobody else shall share it with me.” Evening crept through the pines that shadowed us, but the full glory of the day flamed in that cañon as we went out very cautiously to a jutting piece of rock—blood-red or pink it was—that overhung the deepest deeps of all. Now I know what it is to sit enthroned amid the clouds of sunset. Giddiness took away all sensation of touch or form; but the sense of blinding colour remained. When I reached the mainland again I had sworn that I had been floating.
From Sea to Sea: Letters of Travel (New York, 1899).