This poor old tree has a great hollow burnt in it (I think the Indians must have used it as a kitchen), and our half dozen ponies and mules were stabled in the hollow—a most picturesque group. It seems strange to see trees thus scorched and charred, with their insides clean burnt out, yet, on looking far, far overhead, to perceive them crowned with fresh blue-green, as if nothing ailed them, so great is their vitality. Benjamin Taylor says of such a one, “It did not know that it ought to be dead. The tides of life flowed so mightily up that majestic column!”
The Indians say that all other trees grow, but that the Big Trees are the special creation of the Great Spirit. So here too, you see, we have, not tree-worship, but something of the reverence accorded to the cedar in all lands. The Hebrew poet sang of “the trees of the Lord, even the cedars of Lebanon which He hath planted.” And the Hill tribes of Northern India build a rudely carved temple beneath each specially magnificent clump of Deodar, to mark that they are “God’s trees”; while in the sacred Sanskrit poems they are called Deva dara or Deva daru, meaning the gift, the spouse, the word of God, but in any case, denoting the sanctity of the tree.
Whether these Californian Indians had any similar title for their Big Trees, I have failed to learn; but the name by which they are known to the civilized world is that of Sequoyah, a half-caste Cherokee Indian, who distinguished himself by inventing an alphabet and a written language for his tribe. It was a most ingenious alphabet, consisting of eighty-six characters, each representing a syllable, and was so well adapted to its purpose that it was extensively used by the Indians before the white man had ever heard of it. Afterwards it was adopted by the missionaries, who started a printing-press, with types of this character, and issued a newspaper for the Cherokee tribe, by whom this singular alphabet is still used.
When the learned botanist, Endlicher, had to find a suitable name for the lovely redwood cedars, he did honour to Sequoyah, by linking his memory forever with that of the evergreen forests of the Coast Range. And when afterwards these Big Trees of the same race were discovered on the Sierras, they of course were included under the same family name.
Granite Crags (Edinburgh and London, 1884).
GERSOPPA FALLS
(INDIA)
W. M. YOOL
These, the most famous falls in India, are situated on the Siruvatti (or Sharavati) river, which at that part of its course forms the boundary between the north-west corner of the native state of Mysore and the Bombay Presidency. The source of the river is in Mysore, half-way up Koda Chadri, a hill about five thousand feet high, near the famous old town of Nuggur, once the seat of the Rajahs of Mysore, where are still to be seen the ruins of an old fort and palace, and the walls of the town, eight miles in circumference.
The natives have a legend that the god Rama shot an arrow from his bow on to Koda Chadri, and that the river sprang from the spot where the arrow fell, and hence the name Siruvatti or “arrow-born.” From its source the river flows north for nearly thirty miles through the heart of the Western Ghauts, and then turns west and flows down through the jungles of North Canara to the Indian Ocean—another thirty miles. Shortly after taking the bend westwards there comes the fall, which, on account of its height, is worthy of being reckoned amongst the great waterfalls of the world. Here, at one leap, the river falls eight hundred and thirty feet; and as, at the brink, it is about four hundred yards wide, there are few, if any, falls in the world to match it.