Were I to catalogue in a list the colours I have seen in a volcanic panorama, it would little serve, for it is not the names that count but the special significance of each, and that is not capable of brief statement. Such a scene as I am recalling astonishes by the multitude and close juxtaposition of an apparently countless number of coloured strata. It looks as though Nature had kept changing her mind and staining each successive ejection with a different tint. Sometimes there comes a considerable thickness of a certain coloured rock, but above and below it thin strata will succeed of all sorts of colours. If such a series of deposits is intersected by a cliff, its face will be ruled across by a polychrome multitude of bands. Oftenest, however, the whole mass will be riven into gullies and weathered into pinnacles of all heights and varieties. Or short cliffs and elbows will alternate with slopes of debris. In such cases any sense of order in the succession of colours may be lost. A blue pinnacle will stand before a yellow one, and that beside a red with a green top. In one buttress purple may predominate, in another grey, in a third orange.
The effect on slopes of debris is often most peculiar. Naturally they derive their tint from that of the rocks above, out of whose fragments they are formed. If those rocks are a mass of a single colour, such will be the tint of the debris slope. But if they be fed by the splintered fragments of two different beds, as for example one red, the other yellow, the slope below will be a kind of orange, varying in tone according to the supply of the two ingredients. Sometimes a slope will be, let us say, purple throughout its upper portion till it comes down to a point where white rocks emerge. Below them it will be streaked as by splashes of whitewash. In the floor of a valley, where all these ingredients mix together in sandy intimacy, the general tone will be of a light neutral tint, the colour being destroyed by the intimacy of the mixture, the minuteness of the fractures, and the multiplicity of the incidence and reflection of light.
Where there is snow aloft its melting will enforce the local colour of the rocks or debris over which it flows. Similar will be the effect of a spring bursting out of the hillside. These waters will themselves be brilliantly stained, and if they chance to flow over a bed of snow, they will stain it in their turn. I have seen a blood-red area of snow produced in this fashion.
The reader may not derive from the foregoing description an idea of any effect produced by the reality save strangeness. One should be a landscape-painter of remarkable skill to convey any other. But the actual effect in nature, when the first shock of strangeness has worn off, is an effect of remarkable beauty. The colours in their great variety and multitude do in fact harmonise and agree together. Being fashioned in one work-shop, the work-shop of Nature, the self-same that fashions the eyes and intelligences of men and implants in them the idea of beauty as part of nature's law, they do not appear chaotic or inharmonious to the natural man. On the contrary they are bonded together and informed by the sense of a common origin, a common purpose, and a common meaning. When this unity is felt and perceived by the eye, not only do the forms, for all their jagged and splintered multiplicity, harmonise into compositions of remarkable grandeur, but their rich and varied colouring ennobles and distinguishes those forms.
Views of this kind affect the imagination and impress themselves upon the memory more than most. Amongst the many wide vistas or actual panoramas which a mountain-climber of a few years' experience must have seen, he will doubtless freely admit that there are few which he can recall to his memory with any completeness. The first he ever saw overwhelmed him with their intricate elaboration. Later on, when he knew better what to look for, his susceptibility to impression was already lessened. The same is likely to be true of valley views. How many of them can we conjure up in any detail? The Matterhorn from Zermatt, Mont Blanc from Chamonix, and a few other similarly well-known prospects we know by heart; but of how many valley views, that we have only beheld once or during a short interval, can we form a visual image in our minds. My own experience leads me to conclude, though without making any allowance for a possibly large personal equation, that desert views are more memorable than those in which fertility predominates. Various views in the naked Indus valley are firmly fixed in my mind, though none of them were more than briefly beheld. The same is true of the scenery in the desert volcanic regions with which I am acquainted: the neighbourhood of Arequipa in Peru, parts of the provinces of Oruro and Potosi in Bolivia, the surroundings of the volcanoes of Ascotan in Chile, and of Aconcagua in the Argentine. In all these districts the scenery I beheld remains photographed in my memory with exceptional vividness, not merely its strangeness but its beauty, and the element in the scenery most vividly memorable is the element of colour.
In fact both colour and forms are strange to an eye accustomed to look upon the fertile and normally habitable regions of the earth. This is true not merely of the mountains themselves and their constituent parts but of all their surroundings. I have never looked down upon the boiling interior of an active volcano, such as travellers to Hawaii are privileged to behold on the top of Mauna Loa. That must be a sight passing wonderful. Nor have I ever beheld an erupting volcano from near at hand. But I have seen enough in the volcanic districts of South America to realise the marvels and fascinations they contain. Let me be forgiven for quoting one or two passages from my book on the Bolivian Andes, which were written when the impressions were fresh, though not a detail of them has yet escaped me.
Near Ollague, on the Chile-Bolivian frontier, is an active volcano. It was puffing steam in white jets from its top when I passed. All the hills and ground beneath, utterly bare of vegetation, were red or yellow in colour, or of white ashes dotted over with black cinders. Proceeding southward for some 200 kilometres, this kind of scenery continued. We wandered in and out among volcanoes, lava-streams, and great level sheets of white saline deposit, like frozen lakes covered with snow. Most of the volcanoes were extinct, but some retained the perfection of their form—wide, infinitely graceful cones outlined by a pure unbroken curve against the clear sky. The surface of the hills was often coloured in the most brilliant fashion imaginable. The combinations of the rich colours and strange forms rising beyond, and apparently out of, the large, flat, greyish-white surface of the saline deposits were most beautiful. One white imitation lake was framed in a margin of black volcanic dust and cinders, merging upward into grey sand. White dust-spouts were dancing on its white floor. A riven hill near by revealed streaks of blood-red, chrome yellow, and I know not what other bright colours.
Presently came the smoking volcano San Pedro, with a smaller cone at its foot, from which there stretched to a distance of two or three miles a flow of lava, long cold, but looking as it lies on the sandy desert as though newly poured out. It resembled a glacier with steep sides and snout much crevassed and all covered with black moraine. With this strange product of volcanic convulsion for foreground, the sunburnt and silent desert stretching around, and volcanoes great and small rising behind, San Pedro's head smoking over all, I thought I had never beheld a more weird and uncanny scene. Yet it was beautiful, beyond all question beautiful to a high degree. If a man could be transported to the surface of the Moon, say somewhere near Aristarcus or Gassendi, such, I imagine, might be the kind of landscape that would salute his eyes.
AFTER THE SUNSET