Our modern Briton can be a traveller without any trouble. He is a member of “the Club,” and on the strength of his membership he can criticize “that fellow Burton,” or “that queer fish Palgrave,” and prove to you how, if that “poor devil” Hayward had tried the Chittral Pass instead of the Palmirsteppe, “he would never have come to grief, you know.”
I know one or two excellent idiots, who fancy they are wits because they belong to the Garrick. It is quite as easy to be a traveller by simply belonging to a Travellers’ Club.
Now all this would be a very harmless pastime, if something more serious did not lie behind it; just as the mania to dress ourselves in uniform and carry a rifle through the streets, would also be a very harmless, if a very useless, pastime, if a graver question did not again lie hidden beneath “our noble Volunteers;” but the club traveller and the club soldier are not content with the rôle of lounging mediocrity for which nature destined them. They must needs stand between the spirit of England’s better genius, and England’s real toilers of the wilds. They must supervise and criticize and catechize, and generally play the part of Fuz-buz to the detriment of everything which redounds to the true spirit of England’s honour in the fair field of travel and discovery.
Let there be no mistake in this matter. To those veterans who still stand above the waves of time, living monuments of England’s heroism, in Arctic ice or Africa’s sun, we owe all honour and love and veneration. They are the old soldiers of an army, passed from the world, and when Time sums up the record of their service here below, it will be but to hand up the roll to the Tribunal of the Future.
But it is of the younger race of whom we would speak—that race who buy with gold the right to determine what England shall do, and shall not do, in the wide field of geographical research; who are responsible for the wretched exploratory failures of the past few years; who have allowed the palm of discovery and enterprise to pass away to other nations, or to alien sons. But if we were to say all we think about this matter, we might only tire the reader, and stop until doomsday at the mouth of this Black Cañon of the Ominica.
CHAPTER XXIII.
The Black Cañon.—An ugly prospect.—The vanished boat.—We struggle on.—A forlorn hope.—We fail again.—An unhoped for meeting and a feast of joy.—The Black Cañon conquered.
Casting off from camp, on the morning of the 12th, we pushed right into the mouth of the cañon. At once our troubles began. The steep walls of smooth rock rose directly out of the water—sometimes washed by a torrent, at others beaten by a back-whirl and foaming eddy. In the centre ran a rush of water that nothing could stem. Poling, paddling, clinging with hands and nails to the rock; often beaten back and always edging up again, we crept slowly along under the overhanging cliff, which leaned out two hundred feet above us to hold upon its dizzy verge some clinging pine-tree. In the centre of the chasm, about half a mile from its mouth, a wild cataract of foam forbade our passage; but after a whole morning’s labour we succeeded in bringing the canoe safely to the foot of this rapid, and moored her in a quiet eddy behind a sheltering rock. Here we unloaded, and, clambering up a cleft in the cañon wall two hundred feet above us, passed along the top of the cliff, and bore our loads to the upper or western end of the cañon, fully a mile from the boat. The day was hot and sweltering, and it was hard work.
In one of these many migrations between camp and canoe, it chanced one evening that, missing the trail, my footsteps led me to the base of a small knoll, the sides and summit of which were destitute of trees. Climbing to the top of this hill I beheld a view of extraordinary beauty. Over the sea of forest, from the dark green and light green ocean of tree-tops, the solid mountain mass lay piled against the east. Below my standpoint the first long reach of the cañon opened out; a grim fissure in the forest, in the depths of which the waters caught the reflection of the sun-lit skies above, glowing brightly between the walls of gloomy rock deep hidden beneath the level rays of the setting sun. I stood high above the cañon, high above the vast forest which stretched between me and the mountains; and the eye, as it wandered over the tranquil ocean upon whose waves the isles of light green shade lay gold-crested in the sunset, seemed to rest upon fresh intervals of beauty, until the solid ramparts rent and pinnacled, silent and impassive, caught and rivetted its glance; as their snow-white, motionless fingers, carved in characters that ever last, the story of earth’s loveliness upon the great blue dome of heaven.