It is good to walk here, lightly assailed by the warm summer wind. The weather is warm, so it is probable that Bashan will go wading into the brook to cool his belly—only his belly, for he has a distinct aversion to bringing the more elevated parts of his anatomy in contact with the water. There he stands, with his ears laid back and an expression of piety and alertness upon his face, and lets the water swirl around him and past him. After this he comes sidling up to me in order to shake himself—an operation which, according to his own conviction, must occur in my immediate vicinity. The vigour with which he shakes himself causes a thin spray of water and mud to fly my way. It is no use warding him off with flourished stick and intense objurgations. Under no conditions will he tolerate any interference with anything that appears to him natural, inevitable, and according to the fitness of things.
Farther on the brook, in pursuing its course towards the setting sun, reaches a small hamlet which commands a view towards the north—between the woods and the slope—and at the entrance to this hamlet lies the tavern. Here the brook once more broadens into a pond. The women of the village kneel at the edge of this and wash their linen. A little foot-bridge crosses the stream. Should you venture over you will set foot upon a road which leads from the village towards the city, running between the edge of the wood and the edge of the meadow. Should you leave this road on the right you would be able to reach the river in a few steps by means of a wagon-road that cuts through the wood.
We are now within the zone of the river. The river itself lies before us green and streaked with white and full of liquid roarings. It is actually only a great mountain torrent. Its everlasting rushing sound can be heard with a more or less muffled reverberation everywhere throughout the region. Here it swells and crashes overwhelmingly upon the ears. It might, in fact, serve as a substitute for the sacred and sounding onset of the sea—if no sea is to be had. The ceaseless cry of innumerable land-gulls intermingles with the voice of the stream. In autumn and in winter, and even during the spring, these gulls go circling round and round the mouths of the overflow-pipes, filling the air with their screams. Here they find their food until the season grows milder and permits them to make their way to the lakes in the hills—like the wild and half-wild ducks which also spend the cool and the cold months in the vicinity of the city, balance themselves on the waves, permit themselves to be carried by the current which turns them round and rocks them at will, and then just at the moment when some rapid or whirlpool threatens to engulf them, fly up with light and vibrant wing and settle down once more upon the water—a little farther up-stream.
The region of the river is arranged and classified as follows:—close to the edge of the wood there stretches a broad level of gravel. This is a continuation of the poplar avenue which I have mentioned so frequently, and runs, say, for about a kilometre down-stream, that is to say, to the little ferryman’s house—of which more anon. Behind this the thicket comes closer to the river channel. The purpose of this desert of gravel is clear; it is the first and most prominent of the longitudinal streets, and was lavishly planned by the real estate company as a charming and picturesque esplanade for elegant turnouts—with visions of gentlemen on horseback approaching spick-and-span landaus and victorias glistening in their enamel and engaging in delicate badinage with smiling and “beauteous” ladies reclining at ease under dainty parasols.
Close to the ferryman’s house there is a huge signboard in a state of advanced decreptitude. This proclaims what was to have been the immediate goal, the temporary termination of the carriage corso. For there in broad and blatant letters you may read that this corner site is for sale for the erection of a park café and a fashionable refreshment “establishment.” Well, the purpose remains unfulfilled, and the building site is empty.
For in place of the park café, with its little tables, its hurrying waiters, and glass-and-cup sipping and straw-sucking guests, there is only the big wooden signboard—aslant—a resigned, collapsing bid without a bidder, and the corso itself only a waste of coarsest gravel, covered with willow bushes and with blue sage almost as thickly as the Goethe or Lessing Streets.
Alongside the esplanade, nearer to the river, there runs a smaller gravel way which is also overgrown with insurgent shrubbery. It is characterised by grass mounds which arise at intervals and from which telegraph-poles mount into the air. Yet I am fond of frequenting this road on my walks, first because of the change, and second because the gravel permits of clean though somewhat difficult locomotion, when the clayey footpath yonder does not appear passable during days of heavy rain. This footpath, actually the real promenade, runs for miles along the river and then finally degenerates into wild, haphazard trails along the bank. It is lined along the riverside with saplings, maple and birch, and on the land side it is flanked by the mighty primitive inhabitants of the region—willows, aspens, and silver poplars—all of them colossal in their dimensions. The escarpment plunges steeply and sheerly towards the river-bed. It is protected by ingenious works of woven willow-withes and by a concrete armour along its lower parts against the mounting flood water which once or twice a year comes rolling hither—when the snows melt in the mountains or the rain overdoes itself. Here and there the slope hospitably offers one the use of wooden steps, half ladders and half stairs, by means of which one may, with a fair degree of comfort, descend into the actual river-bed, which is usually quite dry. It is the reserve gravel bed of the big wild brook, and is about six metres wide.
The stream behaves like all other members of its family, the small as well as the smallest, that is to say, according to the weather and the water conditions in the upper mountain regions. Sometimes its course will be a mere green flowing tunnel with the rocks scarcely covered and with the gulls appearing to stand stilt-legged on the very surface itself. And then, again, it will assume a most formidable character, swelling into a wide stream, filling its bed with gray watery fury and tumult, and bearing along in its headlong course all kinds of unseemly objects such as old baskets, pieces of wooden crates, bushes, and dead cats in its circling wrath, and showing a great disposition to flooding and to deeds of violence.
The reserve or overflow channel is also armoured against high water by the same parallel, slanting, and hurdle-like arrangements of willow branches. It is covered with beach-grass and wild oats as well as with the show-plant of the neighbourhood, the dry, omnipresent blue sage. It offers good walking, thanks to the strip of quay formed of tooled and even stone, which runs along the extreme limit of the water. This gives me a further, and in fact favourite, possibility of adding variety to my promenades.
It is true that the unyielding stone is not particularly good going, but one is fully recompensed by the intimate proximity of the water. Then one is also able now and then to walk in the sand beside the quay. Yes, there is real sand there between the gravel and the beach-grass, sand that is a trifle mixed with clay and not so sacredly pure as that of the sea, but nevertheless real sand that has been washed up. I am thus able to fancy myself strolling upon a real strand down there, inscrutably drawing my foot along the perilous edge of the salt flood. There is no lack of surgings, even if there is of surges, nor of the clamour of gulls, nor of that kind of space-annihilating monotony which lulls one into a sort of narcotic absentmindedness. The level cataracts are rushing and roaring all around, and halfway to the ferryman’s house—the voice of a waterfall joins the chorus—from over yonder where the canal, debouching at a slant, pours itself into a river. The body of this fall is arched, smooth, glassy like that of a fish, and an everlasting boiling tumult goes on at its base.