Part 5
We find but little mention of the Tigris in Scripture. It appears indeed under the name of Hiddekel, among the rivers of Eden, and is there correctly described as “running eastward to Assyria.” But after this we hear no more of it, if we except one doubtful allusion in Nahum, until the Captivity, when it becomes well known to the prophet Daniel, who had to cross it in his journeys to and from Susa. With Daniel it is “the Great River”--an expression commonly applied to the Euphrates; and by its side he sees some of his most important visions. No other mention seems to occur except in the apocryphal books; and there it is unconnected with any real history. The Tigris, in its upper course, anciently ran through Armenia and Assyria. Lower down, from above the point where it enters on the alluvial plain, it separated Babylonia from Susiana. In the wars between the Romans and the Parthians we find it constituting, for a short time (from A. D. 114 to A. D. 117), the boundary line between these two empires. Otherwise it has scarcely been of any political importance. The great chain of Zagros is the main natural boundary between Western and Central Asia; and beyond this, the next defensible line is the Euphrates. Historically it is found that either the central power pushes itself westward to that river; or the power ruling the west advances eastward to the mountain barrier.
The water of the Tigris, in its lower course, is yellowish, and is regarded as unwholesome. The stream abounds with fish of many kinds, which are often of a large size. Abundant water-fowl float on the waters. The banks are fringed with palm trees and pomegranates, or clothed with jungle and reeds, the haunt of the wild-boar and the lion.
THE OISE
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
The river was swollen with the long rains. From Vadencourt all the way to Origny, it ran with ever quickening speed, taking fresh heart at each mile, and racing as though it already smelt the sea. The water was yellow and turbulent, swung with an angry eddy among half-submerged willows, and made an angry clatter along stony shores. The course kept turning and turning in a narrow and well-timbered valley. Now, the river would approach the side, and run grinding along the chalky base of the hill, and show us a few open colza fields among the trees. Now, it would skirt the garden-walls of houses, where we might catch a glimpse through a doorway and see a priest pacing in the chequered sunlight. Again the foliage closed so thickly in front, that there seemed to be no issue; only a thicket of willows, overtopped by elms and poplars, under which the river ran flush and fleet, and where a kingfisher flew past like a piece of the blue sky. On these different manifestations, the sun poured its clear and catholic looks. The shadows lay as solid on the swift surface of the stream as on the stable meadows. The light sparkled golden in the dancing poplar leaves, and brought the hills into communion with our eyes. And all the while the river never stopped running or took breath; and the reeds along the whole valley stood shivering from top to toe.
There should be some myth (but if there is, I know it not) founded on the shivering of the reeds. There are not many things in nature more striking to man’s eye. It is such an eloquent pantomime of terror; and to see such a number of terrified creatures taking sanctuary in every nook along the shore, is enough to infect a silly human with alarm. Perhaps they are only a-cold, and no wonder, standing waist deep in the stream. Or perhaps they have never got accustomed to the speed and fury of the river’s flux, or the miracle of its continuous body. Pan once played upon their forefathers; and so, by the hands of the river, he still plays upon these later generations down all the valley of the Oise; and plays the same air, both sweet and shrill, to tell us of the beauty and the terror of the world.
The canoe was like a leaf in the current. It took it up and shook it and carried it masterfully away, like a Centaur carrying off a nymph. To keep some command on our direction, required hard and diligent plying of the paddle. The river was in such a hurry for the sea! Every drop of water ran in a panic, like as many people in a frightened crowd.
There was never any mistake about the Oise, as a matter of fact. In these upper reaches, it was still in a prodigious hurry for the sea. It ran so fast and merrily, through all the windings of its channel that I strained my thumb, fighting with the rapids, and had to paddle all the rest of the way with one hand turned up. Sometimes it had to serve mills; and being still a little river, ran very dry and shallow in the meanwhile. We had to put our legs out of the boat, and shove ourselves off the sand of the bottom with our feet. And still it went on its way singing among the poplars and making a green valley in the world. After a good woman and a good book, and tobacco, there is nothing so agreeable on earth as a river. I forgave it its attempt on my life; which was after all one part owing to the unruly winds of heaven that had blown down the tree, one part to my own mismanagement, and only a third part to the river itself, and that not out of malice, but from its great preoccupation over its business of getting to the sea. A difficult business, too; for the _détours_ it had to make are not to be counted. The geographers seem to have given up the attempt; for I found no map representing the infinite contortion of its course. A fact will say more than any of them. After we had been some hours, three if I mistake not, flitting by the trees at this smooth, breakneck gallop, when we came upon a hamlet and asked where we were, we had got no farther than four kilometres (say two miles and a half) from Origny. If it were not for the honour of the thing (in the Scotch saying), we might almost as well have been standing still.
Moy (pronounce Moÿ) was a pleasant little village gathered round a _château_ with a moat. The air was perfumed with hemp from neighbouring fields. At the Golden Sheep we found excellent entertainment. German shells from the siege of La Fère, Nürnberg figures, gold fish in a bowl, and all manner of knick-knacks embellished the public room. The landlady was a stout, plain, short-sighted, motherly body, with something not far short of a genius for cookery.... We made a very short day of it to La Fère; but the dusk was falling and a small rain had begun before we stowed the boats....
Below La Fère the river runs through a piece of open pastoral country; green, opulent, loved by breeders; called the Golden Valley. In wide sweeps, and with a swift and equable gallop, the ceaseless stream of water visits and makes green the fields. Kine and horses, and little humorous donkeys browse together in the meadows, and come down in troops to the riverside to drink. They make a strange feature in the landscape; above all when startled, and you can see them galloping to and fro, with their incongruous forms and faces. It gives a feeling as of great unfenced pampas and the herds of wandering nations. There were hills in the distance upon either hand; and on one side the river sometimes bordered on the wooded spurs of Coucy and St. Gobain....
All the time, the river stole away like a thief in straight places, or swung round corners with an eddy, the willows nodded and were undermined all day long; the clay banks tumbled in; the Oise, which had been so many centuries making the Golden Valley, seemed to have changed its fancy, and be bent upon undoing its performance. What a number of things a river does, by simply following Gravity in the innocence of its heart!
Noyon stands about a mile from the river, in a little plain surrounded by wooded hills, and entirely covers an eminence with its tile roofs surmounted by a long, straight-backed cathedral with two stiff towers. As we got into the town, the tile roofs seemed to tumble up hill one upon another, in the oddest disorder; but for all their scrambling, they did not attain above the knees of the cathedral, which stood upright and solemn, over all. As the streets drew near to this presiding genius, through the market-place under the Hotel de Ville, they grew emptier and more composed. Blank walls and shuttered windows were turned to the great edifice and grass grew on the white causeway. “Put off thy shoes from off thy feet for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.” The Hôtel du Nord, nevertheless, lights its secular tapers within a stone cast of the church, and we had the superb east end before our eyes all morning from the window of our bedroom....
The most patient people grow weary at last with being continually wetted with rain; except of course in the Scotch Highlands, where there are not enough fine intervals to point the difference. That was like to be our case the day we left Noyon. I remember nothing of the voyage; it was nothing but clay banks and willows and rain; incessant, pitiless, beating rain; until we stopped to lunch at a little inn in Pimprez, where the canal ran very near the river.... That was our last wetting. The afternoon faired up: grand clouds still voyaged in the sky, but now singly and with a depth of blue around their path; and a sunset, in the daintiest rose and gold, inaugurated a thick night of stars and a month of unbroken weather. At the same time, the river began to give us a better outlook into the country. The banks were not so high, the willows disappeared from along the margin, and pleasant hills stood all along its course and marked their profile on the sky.
In a little while, the canal, coming to its last lock, began to discharge its water-houses on the Oise; so that we had no lack of company to fear. Here were all our old friends; the Deo Gratias of Condé and the Four Sons of Aymon journeyed cheerily down stream along with us; we exchanged waterside pleasantries with the steersman perched among the lumber, or the driver hoarse with bawling to his horses; and the children came and looked over the side as we paddled by. We had never known all this while how much we missed them; but it gave us a fillip to see the smoke from their chimneys.
A little below this junction we made another meeting of yet more account. For there we were joined by the Aisne, already a far travelled river and fresh out of Campagne. Here ended the adolescence of the Oise; this was his marriage day; thenceforward he had a stately, brimming march, conscious of his own dignity and sundry dams. He became a tranquil feature in the scene. The trees and towns saw themselves in him, as in a mirror. He carried the canoes lightly on his broad breast; there was no need to work hard against an eddy: but idleness became the order of the day, and mere straightforward dipping of the paddle, now on this side, now on that, without intelligence or effort. Truly we were coming into halcyon weather upon all accounts, and were floated towards the sea like gentlemen.
We made Compiègne as the sun was going down: a fine profile of a town above the river. Over the bridge, a regiment was parading to the drum. People loitered on the quay, some fishing, some looking idly at the stream. And as the two boats shot in along the water, we could see them pointing them out and speaking one to another. We landed at a floating lavatory, where the washerwomen were still beating the clothes.
We put up at a big, bustling hotel in Compiègne, where nobody observed our presence.... It is not possible to rise before a village; but Compiègne was so grown a town that it took its ease in the morning; and we were up and away while it was still in dressing-gown and slippers. The streets were left to people washing door-steps; nobody was in full dress but the cavaliers upon the town-hall; they were all washed with dew, spruce in their gilding and full of intelligence and a sense of professional responsibility. Kling, went they on the bells for the half-past six, as we went by. I took it kind of them to make me this parting compliment; they never were in better form, not even at noon upon a Sunday.
There was no one to see us off but the early washerwomen--early and late--who were already beating the linen in their floating lavatory on the river. They were very merry and matutinal in their ways; plunged their arms boldly in and seemed not to feel the shock. It would be dispiriting to me, this early beginning and first cold dabble, of a most dispiriting day’s work. But I believe they would have been as unwilling to change days with us, as we could be to change with them. They crowded to the door to watch us paddle away into the thin sunny mists upon the river; and shouted heartily after us till we were through the bridge.
There is a sense in which those mists never rose from off our journey; and from that time forth they lie very densely in my note-book. As long as the Oise was a small rural river, it took us near by people’s doors and we could hold a conversation with natives in the riparian fields. But now that it had gone so wide, the life along shore passed us by at a distance. It was the same difference as between a great public highway and a country by-path that wanders in and out of cottage gardens. We now lay in towns, where nobody troubled us with questions; we had floated into civilized life, where people pass without salutation. In sparsely inhabited places, we make all we can of each encounter; but when it comes to a city, we keep to ourselves, and never speak unless we have trodden on a man’s toes. In these waters, we were no longer strange birds, and nobody supposed we had travelled further than from the last town. I remember when we came into L’ Isle Adam, for instance, how we met dozens of pleasure-boats, outing it for the afternoon, and there was nothing to distinguish the true voyager from the amateur, except, perhaps, the filthy condition of my sail. The company in one boat actually thought they recognized me for a neighbour. Was there ever anything more wounding! All the romance had come down to that. Now, on the upper Oise, where nothing sailed as a general thing but fish, a pair of canoeists could not be thus vulgarly explained away; we were strange and picturesque intruders; and out of people’s wonder sprang a sort of light and passing intimacy all along our route....
In our earlier adventures there was generally something to do, and that quickened us. Even the showers of rain had a revivifying effect, and shook up the brain from torpor. But now, when the river no longer ran in a proper sense, only glided seaward with an even, outright, but imperceptible speed, and when the sky smiled upon us day after day without variety, we began to slip into that golden doze of the wind which follows upon much exercise in the open air. I have stupefied myself in this way more than once; indeed, I dearly love the feeling; but I never had it to the same degree as when paddling down the Oise. It was the apotheosis of stupidity....
We made our first stage below Compiègne to Pont Sainte Maxence. I was abroad a little after six the next morning. The air was biting and smelt of frost. In an open place a score of women wrangled together over the day’s market; and the noise of their negotiation sounded thin and querulous like that of sparrows on a winter’s morning. The rare passengers blew into their hands and shuffled in their wooden shoes to set the blood agog. The streets were full of icy shadow, although the chimneys were smoking overhead in golden sunshine. If you wake early enough at this season of the year, you may get up in December to break your fast in June.
At Creil, where we stopped to lunch, we left the canoes in another floating lavatory, which, as it was high noon, was packed with washerwomen, red-handed and loud-voiced; and they and their broad jokes are about all I remember of the place.... The church at Creil was a nondescript place in the inside, splashed with gaudy lights from the windows and picked out with medallions of the Dolorous Way. But there was one oddity, in the way of an _ex voto_, which pleased me hugely: a faithful model of a canal boat, swung from the vault, with a written aspiration that God should conduct the _Saint Nicholas_ of Creil to a good haven.
We made Précy about sundown. The plain is rich with tufts of poplar. In a wide, luminous curve, the Oise lay under the hillside. A faint mist began to rise and confound the different distances together. There was not a sound audible but that of the sheep-bells in some meadows by the river and the creaking of a cart down the long road that descends the hill. The villas in their gardens, the shops along the street, all seemed to have been deserted the day before; and I felt inclined to walk discreetly as one feels in a silent forest.
Of the next two days’ sail little remains in my mind, and nothing whatever in my note-book. The river streamed on steadily through pleasant riverside landscapes. Washerwomen in blue dresses, fishers in blue blouses, diversified the green banks; and the relation of the two colours was like that of the flower and leaf in the forget-me-not. A symphony in forget-me-not; I think Théophile Gautier might thus have characterized that two days’ panorama. The sky was blue and cloudless; and the sliding surface of the river held up, in smooth places, a mirror to the heaven and the shores. The washerwomen hailed us laughingly and the noise of trees and water made an accompaniment to our dozing thoughts, as we fleeted down the stream.
The great volume, the indefatigable purpose of the river held the mind in chain. It seemed now so sure of its end, so strong and easy in its gait, like a grown man full of determination. The surf was roaring for it on the sands of Havre.
THE HUDSON
ESTHER SINGLETON
The Hudson is considered the most beautiful river of the United States. Its scenery is so enchanting that it has been called the “Rhine of America.” Its hills and banks are dotted with palatial residences. To the historian they are eloquent of the brave generals and their armies who fought for Liberty and they charm the dreamer by the legends that cluster around them. It is no trouble for him to see the Phantom Ship scudding across the Tappan Zee, or to people Sleepy Hollow with vanished forms.
George William Curtis pronounced the Rhine of America even grander than the Rhine. He says: “The Danube has in part glimpses of such grandeur. The Elbe has sometimes such delicately pencilled effects. But no European river is so lordly in its bearing, none flows in such state to the sea.”
The Hudson’s course of three hundred miles told briefly is as follows:
It rises in the Adirondacks about 4,000 feet above the sea, where innumerable little streams fed by mountain lakes unite to form the headwaters of the noble river that begins a tortuous course and receives the outlet of Schroon Lake and the Sacondaga River. Turning to the east, it finally reaches Glen’s Falls, where it drops fifty feet. From thence to Troy, it is much broken by rapids, and it is not until it reaches Albany, six miles below Troy, that the Hudson becomes wide and flows through elevated and picturesque banks. Then, in its journey, it passes by the Catskills, or as the Indians called them--the Ontioras (Mountains of the Sky) which are but seven miles from its banks. A short distance below Newburg, sixty-one miles from New York, it begins its passage through the noble hills called The Highlands, an area of about sixteen by twenty-five miles. In the midst of this beautiful scenery on a bold promontory stands the United States Military Academy at West Point. The river then widens into Haverstraw Bay, immediately below which is Tappan Zee, extending from Teller’s Point to Piermont, twelve miles long and from three to four miles wide. Just below Piermont, a range of trap rock--the Palisades--extends to Fort Lee, a distance of about fifteen miles. From Fort Lee to its mouth the Hudson is from one mile to two miles long. The Hudson has been called Shatemuck, the Mohegan, the Manhattan, the Mauritius (in honour of Prince Maurice of Nassau) the Noordt Montaigne, the North River (to distinguish it from the Delaware or South River) the River of the Mountains, and, finally, the Hudson in honour of its discoverer.
Although Verrazano practically discovered this river in 1524, its first navigator was Henry Hudson who in the service of the Dutch West India Company on his voyage in the _Half Moon_ passed through the Narrows in 1609, entered New York Bay and sailed up the Mohegan River as far as Albany.
The Hudson was divided by the old navigators into fourteen reaches, one of which, Claverack (Clover Reach), has survived. First came the Great Chip-Rock Reach (the Palisades); then the Tappan Reach where dwelt the Manhattans, the Saulrickans and the Tappans; the next reach ended at Haverstroo; following came Seylmaker’s Reach, Crescent Reach, Hoges Reach and Vorsen Reach which extended to Klinkersberg (Storm King). Fisher’s Reach, Claverack, Backerack, Playsier and Vaste Reach as far as Hinnenhock; then Hunter’s Reach to Kinderhook; and Fisher’s Hook near Shad Island, where dwelt the Mohegans.
No river in America presents so animated a scene as the Hudson from the Battery to the beginning of the Palisades. Ocean steamers, ferry-boats, excursion boats, private yachts, and craft of all sizes and kinds sail or steam down the narrow channel or cross between the shores of Manhattan and New Jersey. The river is always gay and beautiful in sunshine and fog, winter and summer.
On ascending the river, the first point of interest is Weehawken, on the west, where, on a narrow ledge of rock, Aaron Burr killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel, July 11, 1804. Next, and on the eastern shore, is Spuyten Duyvel Creek, associated with the earliest history of the river. This is a narrow stream formed by the in-flowing tide-water of the Hudson and joining at Kingsbridge with the so-called Harlem River, which is a similar in-flowing of the tide-water of Long Island Sound. Here a bridge was built in 1693; and here, on the 2d of October, Henry Hudson had a severe fight with the Indians who attacked the _Half Moon_. The origin of the name is unknown; but Irving’s legend clings to the spot as a limpet to a rock. He tells the story that the trumpeter, Antony van Corlear, was dispatched one evening on a message up the Hudson. When he arrived at this creek, the wind was high, the elements were in an uproar, and no boatman was at hand. He declared he would swim across _en spijt en Duyvel_ (in spite of the Devil), but was drowned on the way.
Yonkers is the next point of interest on this side of the river, supposed to have derived its name from _yonk-herr_, the young heir. After passing Hastings and Dobbs Ferry (named after an old ferryman), the river widens into a beautiful bay. Across the river, opposite Spuyten Duyvel, is Fort Lee, from which Washington watched the battle that resulted in the loss of Fort Washington. From this point the Palisades begin. This range of rocks is from two hundred and fifty to six hundred feet high and extends about fifteen miles from Fort Lee to the hills of Rockland County.
Opposite Dobbs Ferry, the northern boundary line of New Jersey strikes the Hudson; and from this point north the river runs solely through the state of New York. At this point is Piermont; and near it Tappan, where André was hanged. Directly opposite Piermont is Irvington, twenty-four miles from New York, where close to the water’s edge stands _Sunnyside_, the charming home of Washington Irving, “made up of gable-ends and full of angles and corners as an old cocked hat,” to quote the description of the author, who bought and beautified an old Dutch dwelling called _Wolfert’s Roost_.