that the minute fragments have been deposited by the currents at a distance from the shore, and formed this sandbank. Above the sand, if the surface is subjected to agricultural tests, there is found to be a thin layer of soil gradually diminishing from Barnstable to Truro, where it ceases; but there are many holes and rents in this weatherbeaten garment not likely to be stitched in time, which reveals the naked flesh of the Cape, and its extremity is completely bare. THE UPPER MISSISSIPPI 1 FRANCIS PARKMAN IF Hennepin had had an eye for scenery, he would have found in these his vagabond rovings wherewith to console himself in some measure for his frequent fasts. The young Mississippi, fresh from its northern springs, unstained as yet by unhallowed union with the riotous Missouri, flowed calmly on its way amid strange and unique beauties; a wilderness, clothed with velvet grass; forest-shadowed valleys; lofty heights, whose smooth slopes seemed levelled with the scythe; domes and pinnacles, ramparts and ruined towers, the work of no human hand. The canoe of the voyagers, borne on the tranquil current, glided in the shade of gray crags festooned with honeysuckles; by trees mantled with wild grapevines, dells bright with flowers of the wild euphorbia, the blue gentian, and the purple balm; and matted forests, where the red squirrels leaped and chattered. They passed the great cliff whence the Indian maiden threw herself in her despair; and Lake Pepin lay before them, slumbering in the July sun; the far-reaching sheets of sparkling water, the woody slopes, the tower-like crags, the grassy heights basking in sunlight or shadowed by the passing cloud; all the fair outline of its graceful scenery, the finished and polished masterwork of Nature. And when at evening they made their bivouac fire, and drew up their canoe, while dim, 1 From The Discovery of the Great West. sultry clouds veiled the west, and the flashes of the silent heatlightning gleamed on the leaden water, they could listen, as they smoked their pipes, to the mournful cry of the whippoorwills and the quavering scream of the owls. IN THE SAHEL 1 GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY ONCE on an excursion on the eastern seacoast, the Tunisian Sahel, I left Sousse behind in the noon glare, a busy, thriving, pleasant place, swarming with Arab life in its well-worn ancestral ways and with French enterprise in its pioneering glow. The old Saracen wall lay behind me towered and gated, a true mediæval girdle of defence, and I gazed back on the white city. impearling its high hillside in the right Moslem way, and then settled myself to the long ride southward as I passed through cemeteries, criss-crossed with barbary fig, and by gardens adjoining the sea, and struck out into the plain, spotted with salty tracks and little cultivated. It is thus that a ride on this soil is apt to begin — with a cemetery; it is often the masternote that gives the mood to a subsequent landscape, a mood of sadness that is felt to be sterile also, impregnated with fatalism. A Moslem burying-ground may be, at rare places, a garden of repose; a forsaken garden it is usually, even when most dignified and beautiful with its turbaned pillars in the thick cypresses; but it is always a complete expression of death. The cemetery lies outside at the most used entrance of a town; and, as a rule, in the country it is of a melancholy indescribable - it lies there in so naked a fashion, a hopeless and huddled stretch of withered earth in swells and hummocks, hardly distinguishable from common dirt and débris the eternal potter's field. It is a fixed feature in the Tunisian landscape, which is made of simple elements, whose continuous repetition gives its monotony to 1 From North Africa and the Desert. Charles Scribner's Sons. Reprinted by permission. the land. A ride only rearranges these elements under new lights and in new horizons. Here the great plain was the common background; my course to Sfax lay over it, broken at first by a blossoming of gardens round a town or village, and twice I came out on the sea; but always the course was over a plain with elemental mark and quality with an omnipresence as of the sea on a voyage. The line between man's domain and nature is as sharply drawn on this plain as on a beach; where man has not labored the scene stretches out with nature in full possession, as on the ocean; his habitations and territory are islands. Everything is seen relieved on great spaces, individualized, isolated; fields of grain, green and moving under a strong land wind; or olive groves silvery gleams on the hillsides, clumps of trees, or long lines of them, whole hillsides, it may be; or there are gardens, closed, secluded, thickly planted with pear or peach or fig or other fruit, with vegetables, perhaps, beneath and palms above. The figure scenes, too, are of the same recurring simplicity, a man leading a spirited horse in the street, a camel meagre and solemn and solitary silhouetting the sky anywhere within a range of miles, boys in couples herding sheep in the middle distances. The town or village emerging at long intervals is a monochord — a point of dazzling white far off, dissolving on approach into low houses, a confused mass of uneven roofs skirting the ground except where the minaret and the palm rise and unite it to heaven - to the fire-veined evening sky, deep and tranquil, or the intense blue noon, or the pink morning glory of the spiritualized scene of the dawn. The streets are silent; by the Moorish café lie or sit or crouch motionless figures, sometimes utterly dull, like logs on the earth, or else holding pipes or gazing at checkers, or vacant - always somnolent, statuesque, sedentary. There are no windows, no neighborhood atmosphere only a stagnant exterior. The feeling of a retreat, of repose, of being far away is always there. These towns have a curious mixture of the eternal and the ruined, in their first aspect; as of things left by the tide, derelicts of life, all. A ride in the Sahel is a slow kaleidoscopic combina tion of these things, a reiteration without new meaning, the town, the cemetery, the grove, the garden, the plain, the fields, camel and sheep, and herdboys, horizons, somnolence, tranquillity. What a ride! and then to come out on the sea at Monastir and Mahdia, - such a boundless sea! There may be boats with bending sails, the fisher's life, suggesting those strange outlying islands they touch at, exile-islands from long ago, where Marius found hiding, and where the Roman women of pleasure of the grand world were sent to live and die, out of the world still the home of a race, blending every strain of ancient blood. Mahdia, once an Arab capital and long a seat of power in different ages, is a famous battle-name in Mahometan and crusading and corsair annals; it stood many a great siege in its rocky peninsula, in Norman and other soldiering hands, however lifeless it may seem now; but as one looks on its diminutive harbor, a basin hewn in the rock, it seems now to speak rather of the enmity of the sea and the terror of tempest on this dangerous coast shallow waters and inhospitable shores. History, human courage, was but a wave that broke over it, and is gone like the others, a momentary foam; but the sea is always the sea. Everywhere one must grow familiar with the neighboring coastline before the sea will lay off that look of enmity it wears to all at the first gaze; it is foreign always by nature. To descend here at Mahdia, and to walk by its waves, to hear its roll, to look off to its gulfs and hilltops afar, however brilliant may be the scene, is to invite the deepest melancholy that the waste sea holds so meaningless that world lies in its monotony all about. I remember the Moorish prince who here, after his long victories, stood reflecting on the men who were great before him, and how their glory was gone. It is a more desolate port now. One gladly turns to the land meets the plain, equally vaguely hostile. - - and there So I rode on by the unceasing stretch of the way, through town and by garden and grove, into the ever enveloping plain that opened before. It was like putting to sea at every fresh start; and late in the afternoon, on the last far crest of the rolling plain, I saw the great ruin, El Djem, that rose with immense command ing power and seemed to dominate a world of its own sterile territory. It is a great ruin, a colosseum: arches still in heaven, and piled and fallen rocks of the old colossal cirque ; it still keeps its massive and uplifted majesty, its Roman character of the eternal city cast down in the waste, its monumental splendor, a hoar and solemn token of the time when there were inhabitants in this desolation to fill the vast theatre on days of festival, and the line of its subject highway stretched unbroken to Tunis and southward, a proud, unending urban way of villas, a road of gardens, where now only stagnates the salty plain, sterile, lifeless. The hamlet beside it is hardly perceptible, like a molehill, a mere trace of human life. I sat out the sunset; and after, under a cold starry sky, Orion resplendent in the west and the evening star a glory, I set off again by the long road through the sparkling April darkness and a wind that grew winter-cold with night, southward still - the vast heavens broken forth with innumerable starry lights till after some hours of speeding on a route that was without a living soul, I came again on belated groups of walking Bedouins and fragrant miles of gardens dark by the roadway and many a thick olive grove, and drew up at Sfax. A PINE FOREST 1 STEWART EDWARD WHITE WE rode through the pine forests growing on the ridges and hills in the elevated bowl-like hollows. These were not the socalled "big trees," with those we had to do later. They were merely sugar and yellow pines, but never anywhere have I seen finer specimens. They were planted with a grand. sumptuousness of space, and their trunks were from five to twelve feet in diameter and upwards of two hundred feet high to the topmost spear. Underbrush, ground growth, even saplings 1 From The Mountains. Doubleday, Page and Company. Reprinted by permission. |