Part 17

After this we proceeded easily down the river to Bom Successo, from which point I intended to visit Diamantina City. I had to land here and make my way to Diamantina on mule-back, not an easy journey, involving, as it did, a day and a night. Diamantina, or the Diamond City, was peculiarly situated, almost precipitous to the east and south-west, while the northern part was a continuation of the broken prairie-land. I stayed here as the guest of Sr. João Ribeiro, a diamond merchant, and wealthy and hospitable. I spent at this place three days and thoroughly inspected it. The impression left upon me was most agreeable; the men were the frankest, and the women the prettiest and most amiable, of any it had been my fortune to meet in Brazil; nothing could exceed their hospitality. I will not describe my visit to the diamond diggings, as I have done so fully elsewhere, and this brief sketch must be mainly devoted to my voyage down the river. I will only say that I found it most interesting, and, so far from the diamonds being exhausted, it seemed to me that they were only at the beginning of a supply which might be described as inexhaustible.

On the eleventh day I returned to Bom Successo with great regret, and at 9.30 a.m. on September 7th I dismissed my trooper and his mules, and pushed out of the creek down the river towards Coroa do Gallo. I met with several small troubles, such as low sandbanks, snags, and stones, but managed to push through to the Coroa do Gallo, where I spent the night. The previous day had been burning hot, but when we set forth the weather had become temperate, and, indeed, on all this journey there was nothing much to complain of on account of the climate. We drifted on day after day through a soft and balmy atmosphere, disturbed ever and anon by gusts of wind and vapours; sometimes distant sheet lightning flashed from the mists massing around the horizon, the smoke of the prairie fires rose in columns, and they might have been mistaken for the fumes of a steamer by night. Those that were near glowed like live coals, whilst the more distant gleamed blue.

I landed and stayed a day or two at Guaicuhy, but there was nothing very important to record. I was strongly advised to visit the rapids of the Pirapora, which are said to be, after the Casca d’Anta at the beginning and the Paulo Affonso at the end, the important feature upon the Rio de São Francisco. The word means a “fish leap,” and is applied to places on more than one Brazilian river. With a flush of joy I found myself upon this glorious stream of the future, whose dimensions here measure seven hundred feet. I had seen nothing to compare with it since my visit to the African Congo.

Two new men were hired to guide us in the “tender” canoe, as we wished to shoot the rapids. We eyed curiously the contrasts of the new stream with that which we had lately left. Here the water was of a transparent green; the river seemed to break even from the stiff clay, which was in places caving in. After nine hours of hard work we doubled a wooded projection from the left bank, and sighted the Cachoeira of the Pirapora. The Pirapora differed from anything I had yet viewed; it was, in fact, partly a true fall, divided into two sections, and we trembled to think what the Paulo Affonso might be. Glad to stretch our cramped limbs, we landed on the right bank, and proceeded to inspect the rapids from above. The upper rapid, six feet high, seemed more formidable than the lower of about seven feet. Near the right bank these form true falls; they are also garnished by little ladders, miniature cascades rushing furiously down small, narrow, tortuous, channels, between the teeth of jagged stone-saws, and tumbling over dwarf buttresses. Thus the total height between the upper and the lower “smooths” is thirteen feet. Above the break the stream narrows to 1,800 feet, whilst below it broadens to 3,500 feet. During the dry weather the fair-way, if it may be so called, is a thin sheet of water near the western bank: no raft, however, can pass; canoes must be unladen and towed up. Without a good pilot there is imminent risk.

A storm was gathering, and as we began the descent lightning flashed from the east and south, and from all the horizon, followed by low rumblings of thunder. Presently our cranky canoe was struck by the gale, one of the especial dangers of the São Francisco. The east wind was heard roaring from afar, and as it came down upon the stream, white waves rose after a few minutes, subsiding as easily when the gale had blown itself out. My men preferred the leeward bank, upon which the blast broke, leaving the water below comparatively dead, and thus they escaped the risk of falling trees. The surface of the central channel being now blocked by the furious wind, a backwater during our ascent bore us swiftly down. It was very dark at 7.30, when we landed and climbed the steep and slippery bank. The thunder growled angrily and heavy rain fell, fortunately upon a tight roof. This was the first wet weather that I had experienced since July 21st.

The Pirapora had been on the São Francisco my terminus _ad quem_, and now it was _a quo_, the rest of the voyage being down stream. When we started in the morning the weather was still surly from the effects of last night’s scolding, but the air was transparent and clear; the books no longer curled with drought, and a dose from the quinine bottle was judged advisable. We were evidently at the break of the rainy season. It was noon before the _Eliza_ was poled off from the bank of the Guaicuhy, and turned head downwards into the great stream. We drifted on from day to day until we arrived at São Romao, a God-forgotten place, which I explored; but it was not particularly hospitable, so I returned at evening and spent the night on the _Eliza_, lighted the fire, drew down the awning, and kept out as much of the drifting rain and cold, shifting wind as possible. It was not easy to sleep for the babel of sounds, for the Romanenses were decidedly ill-behaved and uncivilised, and made night hideous with their orgies.

We set out again next day, furling the awning, through the drenching rain. We had a day of wind and water, and then another of very hot sun, and so we went on to Januaria, where I met with frank and ready hospitality. After staying here a night, we took the water again, and proceeded through a small hurricane to Carunhanha, where also I was well received, but had to sleep on board the raft――another night of devilry. Cold wind from the north rushed through the hot air, precipitating a deluge in embryo; then the gale chopped round to the south, and produced another, and fiercer, down-pour. A treacherous lull, and all began again, the wind howling and screaming from the east. The thunder roared and the lightning flashed in all directions; the stream rose in wavelets, which washed over the _Eliza_, and shook her by the bumping of the “tender” canoe. We did not get much sleep that night.

I will not further describe my voyage day after day in the _Eliza_. Suffice it to say, at Varzéa Redonda, a wretched village just before we came to the Paulo Affonso, I dismantled the _Eliza_ and paid off the crew. I was asked to stay on land, but, as I wished to see everything settled, I slept on board, and regretted my resolution. The night was furious, and the wind raised waves that nearly beat the old raft to pieces. My men, having reached the end of their work, had the usual boatman’s spree――hard drinking, extensive boasting, trials of strength, and quarrelling, intermixed with singing, shouting, extemporising verses, and ending in the snores and snorts of Bacchic sleep. I found them very troublesome; but the next morning they shed tears of contrition. I saw them disappear without regret; the only face, indeed, that I was sorry to part from was that of the good old pilot.

The next step was to procure animals and men to take me to the Great Rapids. I had great difficulty in getting these, and when the party was made up it consisted of the worst men, the worst mules, and the worst equipments I had ever seen in Brazil. In two days and two nights I arrived at Paulo Affonso, the King of the Rapids.

I shall never forget my first approach to it. In the distance we heard a deep, hollow sound, soft withal, like the rumbling of a distant storm, but it seemed to come from below the earth, as if we trod upon it. After another mile the ground appeared to tremble at the eternal thunder. A little later we came upon the rapids. Paulo Affonso has well been called the Niagara of Brazil.

The quebrada, or gorge, is here two hundred and sixty feet deep; in the narrowest part it is choked to a minimum breadth of fifty-one feet. It is filled with what seems not water but froth and milk, a dashing and dazzling, a whirling and churning surfaceless mass, which gives a wondrous study of fluid in motion. Here the luminous whiteness of the chaotic foam-crests, hurled in billows and breakers against the blackness of the rock, is burst into flakes and spray that leap half-way up the immuring trough. Then the steam boils over and canopies the tremendous scene. In the stilly air of dull, warm grey, the mists surge up, deepening still more the dizzy fall that yawns under our feet.

The general effect of the picture, and the same may be said of all great cataracts, is the realised idea of power――of power tremendous, inexorable, irresistible. The eye is spell-bound by the contrast of this impetuous motion, this wrathful, maddened haste to escape, with the frail stedfastness of the bits of rainbow, hovering above, with the “Table Rock,” so solid to the tread, and with the placid, settled stillness of the plain and hillocks, whose eternal homes seem to be here. Magic, I may observe, is in the atmosphere of Paulo Affonso; it is the natural expression of the glory and the majesty, the splendour and the glamour of the scene, which Greece would have peopled with shapes of beauty, and which in Germany would be haunted by choirs of flying sylphs and dancing Undines.

I sat over the cataract until convinced it was not possible to become one with the waters; what at first seemed grand and sublime had at last a feeling of awe, too intense to be in any way enjoyable. The rest of the day I spent in camp, where the minor troubles of life soon asserted their power. The sand raised by the strong and steady trade-wind was troublesome, and the surface seething in the sun produced a constant drought. We were now at the head of the funnel, the vast ventilator which guides the gale to the Rio de São Francisco. At night the sky showed a fast-drifting scud, and an angry blast dispersed the gathering clouds of blood-thirsty mosquitos. Our lullaby was the music of Paulo Affonso.

The next day I visited the falls again and explored them thoroughly, going down from the heights above to the base beneath, from which the finest view of the falls was to be obtained. It was a grand climax to my voyage down the São Francisco.

My task was done; I won its reward, and my strength passed from me. Two days of tedious mountain riding led to the Porto das Piranhas, and from here I descended the lower Rio de São Francisco more leisurely, and, when that was done, I finally returned _viâ_ Rio de Janeiro to Santos (São Paulo), _alias_ the Wapping of the Far West, and took up my consular duties once again.

_THROUGH SYRIA TO PALMYRA_

1870

_THROUGH SYRIA TO PALMYRA_

1870

I am “_partant pour la Syrie_,” and though it is comparatively near, we find the journey long. We take steamer to Alexandria, and there await the first vessel going northwards. We embark in a foreign steamer, much preferring the Russian, and after passing, perhaps without sighting, the base of the Nile Delta and the northern terminus of the Suez Canal, we run rapidly up the coast of the Holy Land. We are near enough to see certain of its features, and to feel a throbbing of the heart. Here is Ascalon, the “Bride of Syria,” still redolent of the days of the lion-hearted king and of the right royal Saláh-el-Din. There is Jaffa, the Joppa ever full of the memories of St. Peter. We touch there, but we may not land unless the sea is of the calmest. Now we steam along the site of Cæsarea, the busy city of Herod Agrippa, converted into the most silent waste of ruins that it has ever been our fate to look upon. There we cast anchor for a few days, at the second station, Hazfa, opposite St. Jean d’Acre, that “Key of Palestine” from the days of the Crusaders to the times of Bonaparte, Sir Sydney Smith, and Sir Charles Napier. From this point we swerve rapidly past the brown headland of Carmel, type of excellent beauty to the Hebrew poet, past the white Scala Tyrivrum, whose _promontorium album_ might be a fragment of the white cliffs of Albion, past the bright little town of Tyre, a phœnix rising a third time from its ashes, and past Sidon and Lebanon, memorial names engraved upon our childish hearts too deeply for time or change ever to erase them from the memory of the man. So memorial, indeed, are all these regions that the traveller must keep watch and ward upon himself, under penalty of suffering from what I may call “Holy Land on the brain.” The essence of it consists in seeing all things, not as they are, but as they ought to be; for instance, “hanging gardens” at Damascus, “Roman bridges” in Saracenic arches, and “beautiful blush marble” in limestone stained with oxide. It wrings the hearts of its friends when sighting the Plain of Esdraelon, and in gazing upon a certain mound it exclaims:

What hill is like to Tabor’s hill in beauty and in grace?

This clairvoyance, or idealism, which makes men babble of green fields where only dust meets the eye of sense is by no means an obscure disorder of the brain; on the contrary, it is rather aggressive and violent, whilst writers of guides and handbooks appear abnormally exposed to it. Hence those who prepare for a pilgrimage to the Holy Land must temper information and description with many a grain of salt, or they will undergo no little disappointment. Ideal pleasures ever excel those of reality; but in this case there is an extra and inordinate supply of ideality.

We disembark at the hopeless, wind-lashed roadstead of Beyrut, within the limits of the Land of Promise, but never yet included in the Land of Possession. The trim little harbour-town, seated upon its sloping amphitheatre, converted into “_Colossia Julia Augusta Felix Berytus_” must have been a local Pompeii in the fourth and fifth centuries, and its feminine bust was found associated with the medallions of Alexandria and Halicarnassus. During those ages the Roman and Egyptian galleys jostled one another in the inner port, which now looks like a dock; their palaces and villas covered the slopes with pillars and colonnades; paradises and gardens contrasted with proud fanes rising upon well-wooded and well-watered peaks around――fanes dedicated to gods and goddesses now remembered only by the classical dictionaries. In those days, students of philosophy and theology, of law and language, flocked to Berytus from the most distant lands. But the terrible earthquake of A.D. 551, which laid waste a pleasant site, seems to have been the turning-point of its destinies; the roadstead apparently became shallow, and, despite a noted miracle in the eighth century, Beyrut saw her glory depart for many a generation. At last, in the beginning of the nineteenth century, it had sunk to its lowest, and the petty port, placed under the unimportant Pashalate of Sidon, numbered barely five hundred souls.

Sir Charles Napier, the sailor, changed all that. In the autumn of 1840 he made Beyrut his headquarters, whence he and his gallant crews ranged the hill country around and blockaded the ports, till the career of Ibrahim Pasha was unfortunately cut short. Thereupon the hat began at once to take precedence of the turban, even of the green turban. The headquarters of the Pashalate were transferred from Sidon to Beyrut; European merchants established country houses; missionaries opened schools for both sexes; the different consular corps contended for the construction of roads and the abatement of nuisances; whilst the port was regularly visited by four lines of steamers. Briefly, Beyrut became the only Europeanised place in Syria, and she will probably remain so for many years.

The old part of the city still retains some marks of Orientalism; the old part, with its alleys, wynds, and closes, its wretched lanes, its narrow and slippery thoroughfares, resembling unroofed sewers, is peculiarly sombre and Syrian, full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanliness. Nothing can be meaner than the Customs House, where millions of piastres annually change hands. Of the stately buildings which once adorned it no traces remain but three granite monolithic columns, still towering above modern misery. But the new town which surrounds the ancient archery is Levantine――that is to say, almost Italian; the points of difference being a scatter of minarets and a sprinkling of tropical vegetation, which tells you that you are somewhat nearer the sun. There are houses and hospitals large enough each to lodge its battalions; piano and bugle sounds catch the ear; the carriage is taking the place of the horse and the mule――here, as in South America, a sure sign of civilisation; and Orientalism is essentially at a discount. You must not think of Beyrut as an Eastern city.

Life is easy and death is easier in these sub-tropical regions. Men do little during six days, and carefully rest on the seventh. For eight months they saunter through the tepid air of the Mediterranean seaboard; the other four are spent upon “the mountain” (_i.e._ Lebanon), whose pure, light air is a tonic. The little world of Beyrut rises rather late, and its business hours are but before the noontide breakfast, for here, as amongst the classics, the meals are two per diem. They would be called by our grandfathers dinner and supper; we say breakfast and dinner. Then a little more work precedes a drive or a ride: the stroll is not unknown, the constitutional is. The evenings are spent either in a _café_ or in visits, where whist at times puts in an appearance, and a profound stillness, like that of Lime Street, City, begins to reign about 10 p.m. The theatre has not been imported, although an enterprising Syrian Christian――Moslems cannot originate such things――has, after a visit to Italy, written several comedies in the classical style, unfortunately adopting the French rhymed couplet. The tea party, the little music, and the _soirée dansante_, flourish in what the Beyrutines are pleased to call the “Paris of Syria.” The _jeunesse dorée_, in patent leather boots, “boiled shirts,” fold collars, white ties, and lemon-coloured gloves, loves to don the sables which the English gentleman affects. When he goes forth to make merry, he enters gloves in hand; he prefers round dances to square, and he imitates Europe very literally. But as the Romans kept up the time-honoured and homely eggs as the end of their richest banquets, so the “golden youth” of Beyrut prefers the ugly and unpleasant fez or tarbush. For the rest, young Syria’s ambition is to marry a European wife, and he does not always get the best of _that_ bargain.

In these lands Society still preserves the fragmentary nature which belonged to the ancient world. Beyrut, the port, at the time whereof I write, is distant a single day’s ride from Damascus, the capital of Syria, yet there is no trace of sympathy between the two, and the inland say of the seaboard city:

Its sun cracks [wood or teak], And its water is salt, And its falls are cloud de Paris [dirty of lead].

Again Damascus jeers:

Perish Beyrut, for the reason that her heat resembles Sakar [the eighth hell]. No flowing of milk is found in her, though her sons are [stupid as] cows.

Whereto Beyrut retorts:

At Aleppo man is a dandy and vain, At Shan [Damascus] he is niggard and mean, And the Nizri [Egyptian] is simply a rascal.

Whilst “the lying of Damascus” is an illustration in the mouth of every Beyrutine. We have a rhyme of the kind touching one――

Sir Vicary Gibbs, The inventor of fibs.

But Damascus says of herself, when describing a man who has became civilised: “He hath been Damascus’d.” These sharp sayings, indeed, are not confined to the capital and the port. As of old upon the Sorrentine Plains, to speak of no other place, every town had a nickname, a rhyme, or a tale attached to it, which “kinder ryled up” the inhabitants, so it is the case throughout modern Syria. Thus of Jerusalem men say, as of Meccah:

Her soil is sacred, her sons are soiled.

Of Tiberias, a town built of basalt:

Her stones are black, and her people are Jews.

Of the Naw’arinah, or people of the Auranitis (the great Hauran Valley), we are told that:

They thrice bewildered the Apostle of Allah [Mohammed].

The modern inhabitants of ancient Heliopolis, where Burckhardt found the handsomest woman in Syria, is dubbed:

A Ba’albak bear.

The Halbem village near Damascus is a standing joke with the witty citizens on account of the huge woollen turbans, the loud voice, and the peculiar dispositions of the people. They make “kass,” or lamp-wicks, for Damascus, and it is said that on one occasion, when their shaykh was imprisoned, they threatened, by withholding the supply, to keep the city in total darkness. Also, as a bride was being led home, mounted on an ass, when the doorway was found too low, the popular voice said that her head should be cut off, till some local wise man of Gotham suggested that she might dismount.

Beyrut in my day was connected with Damascus by the only carriageable road in the Holy Land, which was supposed to boast of two others, the Jaffa-Jerusalem and the Alexandretto-Aleppo. These two, however, are utterly unfit for wheels, the reason being that they were laid out by native engineers and administered by the Turks, a nation that has succeeded in nothing but destruction. The distance is forty-seven and a half geographical miles, prolonged to sixty by the old road and to seventy-two by the new one.[8]