Part 10 (1/2)
But when all the dramatic stage of their existence is over, and the fires are out and the earth around has ceased from quaking; when trees have gathered over the lava torrents and rich vegetation has covered up cinders and ash; when the sulphurous vents are become sapphire pools of clear water overshadowed by foliage, and all the ghastly details of tragedy are covered up by the splendid garments of tropical vegetation; then you may approach and ascend if you please, but it will not be as a climber, for the climber is one who seeks the naked places of the earth, and does not wander for choice in gra.s.sy dells and tree-embosomed shades.
He, however, who should converse about volcanoes and say no more than this, would leave a most false impression upon his hearers, for Nature always provides compensations for her sincere and humble lovers, and even in the barest volcano she has not failed. The very rapidity with which they yield to destructive forces leads to results not discoverable in stronger and more resolute peaks. Frost, winter, and snow breach their sides with exceeding facility. Torrents dig gullies into them. The very winds blow their substance away. Hence it comes that a volcano in active process of destruction often provides detailed scenery of astonis.h.i.+ng grandeur and boldness. Its vertical-walled gullies, its cliffs, its castellated ridges are like none other. There is no aspect of durability about them, no signs of h.o.a.ry antiquity, none of the dignity that belongs to archaean rocks. They are visibly in rapid decay, yet, for all that and even because of it, they are strangely imposing with a sort of rococo grandeur. If the Meije and Ushba are Romanesque, if the Matterhorn, Masherbrum, and Siniolk.u.m are Gothic, we may describe the world's shattered volcanoes as Flamboyant. They boast a greater and more unusual variety of forms, a multiplicity of details that bewilders.
The spiry exuberance of Milan Cathedral can be paralleled in the neighbourhood of Aconcagua. Nowhere are b.u.t.tresses more emphatic, points of rock in perilous precipitance of decay more plentiful, cliffs more abrupt, the skeleton of the mountains more nakedly displayed.
Yet better deserving of note is the brilliancy and variety of the colouring by which volcanic rocks are often characterised. The local colouring of Alpine rocks is seldom rich. The Dolomites indeed have a reputation for the richness of their tints, but it is mainly derived from the sunrise and sunset colouring which they reflect so brilliantly that it almost seems to proceed from them. The general effect of Alpine rocks is some variety of grey or brown, the tone of which is deepened by contrast with the snows. Except in volcanic districts, it is only in Spitsbergen, and at one or two spots in the Himalayas, that I have observed the local colouring of the rocks to form a prominent factor in the beauty of a mountain view. There indeed the red and yellow sandstones display their rich tints with great effect, so that the colour, s.h.i.+ning over the wide expanses of Arctic glacier and snow-field, becomes a main element, and reduces the forms of the peaks to a secondary consideration. Yet in Spitsbergen this only happens in a relatively small area, within Kings Bay.
In volcanic districts, however, the colouring of the rocks is almost always remarkable. It seems as though Nature had emptied her whole palette upon them. Hardly any tint, from white to black, is missing.
Other mountains depend for their colour upon the atmosphere. These are independent of that source. Their own colour is predominant. All they ask for is transparent air and bright suns.h.i.+ne to display them. Their combination is so unusual, their chord so unlike any to which we are accustomed in ordinary natural surroundings, that they cannot fail to be the chief element in the view. That is why photographs of volcanic scenery convey an impression so different from actual sight. The normal blues, greens, and browns of the temperate habitable regions; the black, greys, and whites of the snowy world; the blue sea, white sand, and red cliffs of a Devonian coast: such chords of colour are usual; the eye expects them. Even a tropical landscape, except for its occasional blazes of blossom, belongs to the same category. Autumnal glories, first of golden harvest, later of iridescent foliage, are an accustomed sight.
But all these schemes of colour belong to a wholly different category from that which volcanic rock-ma.s.ses display. They bring together, combine, and contrast a whole series of unusual tints. Their purples are not the purples which we elsewhere know. Their greens are not the greens of vegetation. Their yellows are not the yellows of a blossoming field or a fading forest.
Were I to catalogue in a list the colours I have seen in a volcanic panorama, it would little serve, for it is not the names that count but the special significance of each, and that is not capable of brief statement. Such a scene as I am recalling astonishes by the mult.i.tude and close juxtaposition of an apparently countless number of coloured strata. It looks as though Nature had kept changing her mind and staining each successive ejection with a different tint. Sometimes there comes a considerable thickness of a certain coloured rock, but above and below it thin strata will succeed of all sorts of colours. If such a series of deposits is intersected by a cliff, its face will be ruled across by a polychrome mult.i.tude of bands. Oftenest, however, the whole ma.s.s will be riven into gullies and weathered into pinnacles of all heights and varieties. Or short cliffs and elbows will alternate with slopes of debris. In such cases any sense of order in the succession of colours may be lost. A blue pinnacle will stand before a yellow one, and that beside a red with a green top. In one b.u.t.tress purple may predominate, in another grey, in a third orange.
The effect on slopes of debris is often most peculiar. Naturally they derive their tint from that of the rocks above, out of whose fragments they are formed. If those rocks are a ma.s.s of a single colour, such will be the tint of the debris slope. But if they be fed by the splintered fragments of two different beds, as for example one red, the other yellow, the slope below will be a kind of orange, varying in tone according to the supply of the two ingredients. Sometimes a slope will be, let us say, purple throughout its upper portion till it comes down to a point where white rocks emerge. Below them it will be streaked as by splashes of whitewash. In the floor of a valley, where all these ingredients mix together in sandy intimacy, the general tone will be of a light neutral tint, the colour being destroyed by the intimacy of the mixture, the minuteness of the fractures, and the multiplicity of the incidence and reflection of light.
Where there is snow aloft its melting will enforce the local colour of the rocks or debris over which it flows. Similar will be the effect of a spring bursting out of the hillside. These waters will themselves be brilliantly stained, and if they chance to flow over a bed of snow, they will stain it in their turn. I have seen a blood-red area of snow produced in this fas.h.i.+on.
The reader may not derive from the foregoing description an idea of any effect produced by the reality save strangeness. One should be a landscape-painter of remarkable skill to convey any other. But the actual effect in nature, when the first shock of strangeness has worn off, is an effect of remarkable beauty. The colours in their great variety and mult.i.tude do in fact harmonise and agree together. Being fas.h.i.+oned in one work-shop, the work-shop of Nature, the self-same that fas.h.i.+ons the eyes and intelligences of men and implants in them the idea of beauty as part of nature's law, they do not appear chaotic or inharmonious to the natural man. On the contrary they are bonded together and informed by the sense of a common origin, a common purpose, and a common meaning. When this unity is felt and perceived by the eye, not only do the forms, for all their jagged and splintered multiplicity, harmonise into compositions of remarkable grandeur, but their rich and varied colouring enn.o.bles and distinguishes those forms.
Views of this kind affect the imagination and impress themselves upon the memory more than most. Amongst the many wide vistas or actual panoramas which a mountain-climber of a few years' experience must have seen, he will doubtless freely admit that there are few which he can recall to his memory with any completeness. The first he ever saw overwhelmed him with their intricate elaboration. Later on, when he knew better what to look for, his susceptibility to impression was already lessened. The same is likely to be true of valley views. How many of them can we conjure up in any detail? The Matterhorn from Zermatt, Mont Blanc from Chamonix, and a few other similarly well-known prospects we know by heart; but of how many valley views, that we have only beheld once or during a short interval, can we form a visual image in our minds. My own experience leads me to conclude, though without making any allowance for a possibly large personal equation, that desert views are more memorable than those in which fertility predominates. Various views in the naked Indus valley are firmly fixed in my mind, though none of them were more than briefly beheld. The same is true of the scenery in the desert volcanic regions with which I am acquainted: the neighbourhood of Arequipa in Peru, parts of the provinces of Oruro and Potosi in Bolivia, the surroundings of the volcanoes of Ascotan in Chile, and of Aconcagua in the Argentine. In all these districts the scenery I beheld remains photographed in my memory with exceptional vividness, not merely its strangeness but its beauty, and the element in the scenery most vividly memorable is the element of colour.
In fact both colour and forms are strange to an eye accustomed to look upon the fertile and normally habitable regions of the earth. This is true not merely of the mountains themselves and their const.i.tuent parts but of all their surroundings. I have never looked down upon the boiling interior of an active volcano, such as travellers to Hawaii are privileged to behold on the top of Mauna Loa. That must be a sight pa.s.sing wonderful. Nor have I ever beheld an erupting volcano from near at hand. But I have seen enough in the volcanic districts of South America to realise the marvels and fascinations they contain. Let me be forgiven for quoting one or two pa.s.sages from my book on the Bolivian Andes, which were written when the impressions were fresh, though not a detail of them has yet escaped me.