Part 24

It is probable the river flowing northwards, on which he made a journey and returned, is a branch of Peel River. The timber on the gravel terraces of the water-shed, he described as small and open. He was alone in this unknown wilderness all summer, not seeing even any of the natives. There are few men, I think, so constituted as to be capable of isolating themselves in such a manner.

On the 1st of September, we passed the site of the temporary trading-post shown on the maps as Fort Reliance. Several days of continuous rain now interrupted our work so that Forty Mile River (Cone Hill River of Schwatka) was not reached till the 7th of September.

THE JORDAN

ANDREW ROBERT FAUSSET

The Jordan is two hundred miles long from its source at Antilebanon to the head of the Dead Sea. It is not navigable, nor has it ever had a large town on its banks. The cities Bethsham and Jericho on the west, and Gerasa, Pella, and Gadara to the east of Jordan produced intercourse between the two sides of the river. Yet it is remarkable as the river of the great plain (_ha Arabah_, now el Ghor) of the Holy Land, flowing through the whole from north to south. Lot, from the hills on the north-west of Sodom, seeing the plain well watered by it, as Egypt is by the Nile, chose that district as his home, in spite of the notorious wickedness of the people.

Its sources are three. The northernmost near Hasbeya between Hermon and Lebanon; the stream is called Hasbany. The second is best known, near Banias, _i. e._, Cæsarea Philippi, a large pool beneath a high cliff, fed by gushing streamlets, rising at the mouth of a deep cave; thence the Jordan flows, a considerable stream. The third is at Dan, or Tel el Kady (Daphne); from the north-west corner of a green eminence a spring bursts forth into a clear wide pool, which sends a broad stream into the valley. The three streams unite at Tel Dafneh, and flow sluggishly through marshland into Lake Meron. Captain Newbold adds a fourth, _wady el Kid_ on the south-east of the slope, flowing from the springs Esh Shar. Indeed Antilebanon abounds in gushing streams which all make their way into the swamp between Banias and Huleh and become part of the Jordan. The traditional site of Jacob’s crossing Jordan at his first leaving Beersheba for Padan Aram is a mile and a half from Merom, and six from the Sea of Galilee: in those six its descent with roaring cataracts over the basaltic rocks is 1,050 feet. This, the part known to Naaman in his invasions, is the least attractive part of its course; and was unfavourably contrasted with Abana and Pharpar of his native land. From the Sea of Galilee, it winds 200 miles in the sixty miles of actual distance to the Dead Sea. Its tortuous course is the secret of the great depression (the Dead Sea being 663 feet below the lake of Galilee) in this distance.

Three banks may be noted in the Ghor or Jordan valley, the upper or first slope (the abrupt edge of a wide table land reaching to the Hauran Mountains on the east and the high hills on the west side), the lower or middle terrace embracing the strip of land with vegetation, and the true banks of the river bed, with a jungle of agnus castus, tamarisks, and willows and reed and cane at the edge, the stream being ordinarily thirty yards wide. At the flood, the river cannot be forded, being ten or twelve feet deep east of Jericho; but in summer it can, the water being low. To cross it in the flood by swimming was an extraordinary feat performed by the Gadites who joined David; this was impossible for Israel under Joshua with wives and children. The Lord of the whole earth made the descending waters stand in a heap very far from their place of crossing, viz: by the town of Adam, that is beside Zarthan or Zaretan, the moment that the feet of the priests bearing the ark dipped into the water. The priests then stood in the midst of the dry river bed till all Israel crossed over. Joshua erected a monument of twelve large stones in the river bed where the priests had stood, near the east bank of the river. This would remain at least for a time as a memorial to the existing generation besides the monument erected at Gilgal.

By this lower ford, David passed to fight Syria, and afterwards in his flight from Absalom to Mahanaim, east of Jordan. Thither Judah escorted him and we crossed in a ferry boat. Here Elijah and Elisha divided the waters with the prophets’ mantle. At the upper fords Naaman washed off his leprosy. Here too the Syrians fled, when panic-struck by the Lord.

John the Baptist “first” baptized at the lower ford near Jericho, whither all Jerusalem and Judea resorted, being near; where too, our Lord took refuge from Jerusalem, and where many converts joined Him, and from whence He went to Bethany to raise Lazarus. John’s next baptisms were at Bethabara; thither out of Galilee the Lord Jesus and Andrew repaired after the baptisms in the south, and were baptized. His third place of baptism was near Ænon and Salim, still farther to the north, where the water was still deep though it was summer, after the passover, for there was no ford there; he had to go thither, the water being too shallow at the ordinary fords. John moved gradually northwards towards Herod’s province, where ultimately he was beheaded; Jesus, coming from the north southwards, met John half-way.

The overflow of Jordan dislodged the lion from its lair on the wooded banks. Between Merom and Lake Tiberias the banks are so thickly wooded as often to shut out the view of the water.

Four-fifths of Israel, nine tribes and a half, dwelt west, and one-fifth, two and a half, dwelt east of Jordan. The great altar built by the latter was the witness of the oneness of the two sections. Of the six cities of refuge three were east, three west of Jordan at equal distances.

Jordan enters Gennesareth two miles below the ancient city Julias, or Bethsaida, of Gaulonitis on the east bank. It is seventy feet wide at its mouth, a sluggish, turbid stream. The lake of Tiberias is 653 feet below the Mediterranean level. The Dead Sea is 1,316 feet below the Mediterranean, the springs of Hasbeya are 1,700 above the Mediterranean, so that the valley falls more than 3,000 feet in reaching the north end of the Dead Sea. The bottom descends 1,308 feet lower, in all 2,600 below the Mediterranean. The Jordan, well called “the Descender,” descends eleven feet every mile. Its sinuosity is less in its upper course. Besides the Jabbok it receives the Hieromax (_Yarmuk_) below Gennesareth. From Jerusalem to Jordan is only a distance of twenty miles; in that distance the descent is 3,500 feet, one of the greatest chasms in the earth; Jerusalem is 2,581 feet above the Mediterranean.

Bitumen wells are not far from the Hasbeya in the north. Hot springs abound about Tiberias; and other tokens of volcanic action, tufa, etc., occur near the Yarmuk’s mouth and elsewhere. Only on the east border of Lake Huleh, the land is now well cultivated, and yields largely wheat, maize, rice, etc. Horses, cattle, and sheep, and black buffaloes (the “bulls of Bashan”) pasture around. West of Gennesareth are seen corn, palms, vines, figs, melons, and pomegranates. Cultivation is rare along the lower Jordan, but pink oleanders, arbutus, rose hollyhocks, the purple thistle, marigold, and anemone abound. Tracks of tigers and wild boars, flocks of wild ducks, cranes, and pigeons have been seen by various explorers. There are no bridges earlier than the Roman. The Saracens added or restored some. The Roman bridge of ten arches, was on the route from Tiberias to Gadara. In coincidence with Scripture, the American survey sets down three fords: that at Tarichæa, the second at the Jabbok’s confluence with the Jordan, and that at Jericho. The Jordan seldom now overflows its banks; but Lieutenant Lynch noticed sedge and driftwood high up in the overhanging trees on the banks, showing it still at times overflows the plains. The flood never reaches beyond the lower line of the Ghor, which is covered with vegetation. The plain of the Jordan between the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea is generally eight miles broad, but at the north end of the Dead Sea the hills recede so that the width is twelve miles, of which the west part is named “the plains of Jericho.” The upper terrace immediately under the hills is covered with vegetation; under that is the Arabah or desert plain, barren in its southern part except where springs fertilize it, but fertile in its northern part and cultivated by irrigation. Grove remarks of the Jordan: “So rapid that its course is one continued cataract, so crooked that in its whole lower and main course it has hardly a half mile straight, so broken with rapids that no boat can swim any distance continuously, so deep below the adjacent country that it is invisible and can only be with difficulty approached; refusing all communication with the ocean, and ending in a lake where navigation is impossible, unless for irrigation, it is in fact what its Arabic name signifies, nothing but a ‘great watering place,’ _Sheriat el Khebir_.”

THE CONCORD

HENRY D. THOREAU

The Musketaquid, or Grass-ground River, though probably as old as the Nile or Euphrates, did not begin to have a place in civilized history, until the fame of its grassy meadows and its fish attracted settlers out of England in 1635, when it received the other but kindred name of Concord from the first plantation on its banks, which appears to have been commenced in a spirit of peace and harmony. It will be Grass-ground River as long as grass grows and water runs here; it will be Concord River only while men lead peaceable lives on its banks. To an extinct race it was grass-ground, where they hunted and fished, and is still perennial grass-ground to Concord farmers, who own the great meadows, and get the hay from year to year. “One branch of it,” according to the historian of Concord, for I love to quote so good authority, “rises in the south part of Hopkinton, and another from a pond and a large cedar-swamp in Westborough,” and flowing between Hopkinton and Southborough, through Framingham, and between Sudbury and Wayland, where it is sometimes called Sudbury River, it enters Concord at the south part of the town, and after receiving the North or Assabeth River, which has its source a little farther to the north and west, goes out at the north-east angle, and flowing between Bedford and Carlisle, and through Billerica, empties into the Merrimack at Lowell. Between Sudbury and Wayland the meadows acquire their greatest breadth, and when covered with water, they form a handsome chain of shallow vernal lakes, resorted to by numerous gulls and ducks. Just above Sherman’s Bridge, between these towns, is the largest expanse, and when the wind blows freshly in a raw March day, heaving up the surface into dark and sober billows or regular swells, skirted as it is in the distance with alder-swamps and smoke-like maples, it looks like a smaller Lake Huron, and is very pleasant and exciting for a landsman to row or sail over. The farmhouses along the Sudbury shore, which rises gently to a considerable height, command fine water prospects at this season. The shore is more flat on the Wayland side and this town is the greatest loser by the flood. Its farmers tell me that thousands of acres are flooded now, since the dams have been erected, where they remember to have seen the white honeysuckle or clover growing once, and they could go dry with shoes only in summer. Now there is nothing but blue-joint and sedge and cut-grass there, standing in water all the year round. For a long time, they made the most of the driest season to get their hay, working sometimes till nine o’clock at night, sedulously paring with their scythes in the twilight round the hummocks left by the ice; but now it is not worth the getting when they can come at it and they look sadly round to their wood-lots and upland as a last resource.

It is worth the while to make a voyage up this stream, if you go no farther than Sudbury, only to see how much country there is in the rear of us; great hills, and a hundred brooks, and farmhouses, and barns, and haystacks, you never saw before, and men everywhere. Sudbury, that is _Southborough_ men, and Wayland, and Nine-Acre-Corner men, and Bound Rock, where four towns bound on a rock in the river, Lincoln, Wayland, Sudbury, Concord. Many waves are there agitated by the wind, keeping nature fresh, the spray blowing in your face, reeds and rushes waving; ducks by the hundred, all uneasy in the surf, in the raw wind, just ready to rise, and now going off with a clatter and a whistling like riggers straight from Labrador, flying against the stiff gale with reefed wings, or else circling round first, with all their paddles briskly moving, just over the surf, to reconnoitre you before they leave these parts; gulls wheeling overhead, muskrats swimming for dear life, wet and cold, with no fire to warm them by that you know of; their laboured homes rising here and there like haystacks; and countless mice and moles and winged titmice along the sunny, windy shore; cranberries tossed on the waves and heaving up on the beach, their little red skiffs beating about among the alders;--such natural tumult as proves the last day is not yet at hand. And there stands all around the alders, and birches, and oaks, and maples, full of glee and sap, holding in their buds, until the waters subside. You shall perhaps run aground on Cranberry Island, only some spires of last year’s pipe-grass above water, to show where the danger is, and get as good a freezing there as anywhere on the North-west Coast. I never voyaged so far in all my life. You shall see men you never heard of before, whose names you don’t know, going away down through the meadows with long ducking-guns, with watertight boots wading through the fowl-meadow grass, on bleak, wintry, distant shores, with guns at half-cock, and they shall see teal, blue-winged, green-winged, shelldrakes, whistlers, black ducks, ospreys, and many other wild and noble sights before night, such as they who sit in parlours never dream of. You shall see rude and sturdy, experienced men, keeping their castles, or teaming up their summer’s wood, or chopping alone in the woods, men fuller of talk and rare adventure in the sun and wind and rain, than a chestnut is of meat; who were out not only in ’75 and 1812, but have been out every day of their lives; greater men than Homer, or Chaucer, or Shakespeare, only they never got time to say so; they never took to the way of writing. Look at their fields, and imagine what they might write, if ever they should put pen to paper. Or what have they not written on the face of the earth already, clearing, and burning, and scratching, and harrowing, and ploughing, and subsoiling, in and in, and out and out, and over and over, again and again, erasing what they had already written for want of parchment.

As yesterday and the historical ages are past, as the work of to-day is present, so some flitting perspectives, and demi-experiences of the life that is in nature are in time veritably future, or rather outside to time, perennial, young, divine, in the wind and rain which never die.

The respectable folks,-- Where dwell they? They whisper in the oaks, And they sigh in the hay; Summer and winter, night and day, Out on the meadow, there dwell they. They never die, Nor snivel, nor cry, Nor ask our pity With a wet eye. A sound estate they never mend, To every asker readily lend; To the ocean wealth, To the meadow health, To Time his length, To the rocks strength, To the stars light, To the weary night, To the busy day, To the idle play; And so their good cheer never ends, For all are their debtors, and all their friends.

Concord River is remarkable for the gentleness of its current, which is scarcely perceptible, and some have referred to its influence the proverbial moderation of the inhabitants of Concord, as exhibited in the Revolution, and on later occasions. It has been proposed, that the town should adopt for its coat of arms a field verdant, with the Concord circling nine times around. I have read that a descent of an eighth of an inch in a mile is sufficient to produce a flow. Our river has, probably, very near the smallest allowance. The story is current, at any rate, though I believe that strict history will bear it out, that the only bridge ever carried away on the main branch, within the limits of the town, was driven up stream by the wind. But wherever it makes a sudden bend it is shallower and swifter, and asserts its title to be called a river. Compared with the other tributaries of the Merrimack, it appears to have been properly named Musketaquid, or Meadow River, by the Indians. For the most part, it creeps through broad meadows, adorned with scattered oaks, where the cranberry is found in abundance, covering the ground like a moss-bed. A row of sunken dwarf willows borders the stream on one or both sides, while at a greater distance the meadow is skirted with maples, alders, and other fluviatile trees, overrun with the grape-vine, which bears fruit in its season, purple, red, white, and other grapes. Still farther from the stream, on the edge of the firm land, are seen the gray and white dwellings of the inhabitants.

The sluggish artery of the Concord meadows steals thus unobserved through the town, without a murmur or a pulse beat, its general course from south-west to north-east, and its length about fifty miles; a huge volume of matter, ceaselessly rolling through the plains and valleys of the substantial earth with the moccasined tread of an Indian Warrior, making haste from the high places of the earth to its ancient reservoir. The murmurs of many a famous river on the other side of the globe reach even to us here, as to more distant dwellers on its banks; many a poet’s stream floating the helms and shields of heroes on its bosom. The Xanthus or Scamander is not a mere dry channel and bed of a mountain torrent, but fed by the overflowing springs of fame;--

“And thou Simois, that as an arrowe, clere Through Troy rennest, aie downward to the sea”;--

and I trust that I may be allowed to associate our muddy but much abused Concord River with the most famous in history.

“Sure there are poets which did never dream Upon Parnassus, nor did taste the stream Of Helicon; we therefore may suppose Those made not poets, but the poets those.”

The Mississippi, the Ganges and the Nile, those journeying atoms from the Rocky Mountains, the Himmaleh, and Mountains of the Moon, have a kind of personal importance in the annals of the world. The heavens are not yet drained over their sources, but the Mountains of the Moon still send their annual tribute to the Pasha without fail, as they did to the Pharaohs, though he must collect the rest of his revenue at the point of the sword. Rivers must have been the guides which conducted the footsteps of the first travellers. They are the constant lure, when they flow by our doors, to distant enterprise and adventure, and, by a natural impulse, the dwellers on their banks will at length accompany their currents to the lowlands of the globe, or explore at their invitation the interior of continents. They are the natural highways of all nations, not only levelling the ground and removing obstacles from the path of the traveller, quenching his thirst and bearing him on their bosoms, but conducting him through the most interesting scenery, the most populous portions of the globe, and where the animal and vegetable kingdoms attain their greatest perfection.

I had often stood on the banks of the Concord, watching the lapse of the current, an emblem of all progress, following the same law with the system, with time, and all that is made; the weeds at the bottom gently bending down the stream, shaken by the watery wind, still planted where their seeds had sunk, but erelong to die and go down likewise; the shining pebbles, not yet anxious to better their condition, the chips and weeds, and occasional logs and stems of trees that floated past, fulfilling their fate, were objects of singular interest to me, and at last I resolved to launch myself on its bosom and float whither it would bear me.

THE TAGUS

ARTHUR SHADWELL MARTIN

The Tagus rises in that maze of mountains between Cuenca and Tereul on the frontier of New Castile and Aragon. It is the largest river of the Iberian peninsula, having a length of 566 miles. It is of little commercial advantage, however, as a means of traffic and communication, because in Spain its shallows, rapids and cataracts render it unnavigable through much of its course; and only from Villavelha, eighteen miles within the Portuguese frontier does it become navigable for the remaining 115 miles to its mouth. It flows from its source first north-westwards for about thirty miles to its junction with the Gallo, where it turns to the south-west to Toledo, whence it flows westwards to the frontier of Portugal at Abrantes. There it again curves south-westwards and falls into the Atlantic ten miles below Lisbon.

The waves of the Tagus, according to ancient historians, rolled with gold; it is even said that the sceptre of the kings of Portugal is made of the gold dust found in the deposit of this river. However, the Tagus is not now endowed with this auriferous virtue; and its banks in nowise deserve the brilliant descriptions indulged in by ancient and modern poets. They are generally escarpments and rocky gorges. The traveller, who follows the course of the stream through a country often bare, arid and uncultivated, or burnt up by the sultry rays of the sun, sees little but an impetuous water course, narrow and impeded with dangerous rocks, forming dangerous cataracts and rapids. The rocky cliffs that hem it in have little vegetation beyond a few evergreen oaks; and with a few rare exceptions, notably the valleys of Aranjuez and Talavera, which have been embellished with human art and culture there are few parts of Spain so poor and savage in character. In winter, the Tagus has a considerable rise, and covers the few plains to be found along its banks; but in summer, like most of the other Spanish rivers it dwindles to almost nothing; so that even below Santarem, from Alcantara to the confluence of the Zezere, navigation is interrupted by numerous cataracts.

“Of the various phases of its most poetical and picturesque course--first green and arrowy amid the yellow cornfields of New Castile; then freshening the sweet Tempe of Aranjuez, clothing the garden with verdure, and filling the nightingale-tenanted glens with groves; then boiling and rushing around the granite ravines of rock-built Toledo, hurrying to escape from the cold shadows of its deep prison, and dashing joyously into light and liberty, to wander far away into silent plains and on to Talavera, where its waters were dyed with brave blood, and gladly reflected the flash of the victorious bayonets of England,--triumphantly it rolls thence, under the shattered arches of Almaraz, down to desolate Estremadura, in a stream as tranquil as the azure sky by which it is curtained, yet powerful enough to force the mountains of Alcantara. There the bridge of Trajan is worth going a hundred miles to see; it stems the now fierce condensed stream, and ties the rocky gorges together; grand, simple, and solid, tinted by the tender colours of seventeen centuries, it looms like the grey skeleton of Roman power, with all the sentiment of loneliness, magnitude, and the interest of the past and present.