Aïr Mountains

“ Great is the contrast between mountain and desert, but greater still the change after the long, long journey through the featureless land to the south, for from the seaboard on the West Coast, from Lagos [135] to Agades, there is no majestic range of like kind to those mountains of Aïr. ”

“ The trail rose gradually by imperceptible gradations and occasional climbs. We journeyed in the great cañons. High chaparral flanked the trail, occasional wide gray stretches of "old man" filled the air with its pungent odor and with the calls of its quail. The crannies of the rocks, the stretches of wide loose shale, the crumbling bottom earth offered to the eye the dessicated beauties of creamy yucca, of yerba buena, of the gaudy red paint-brushes, the Spanish bayonet; and to the nostrils the hot dry perfumes of the semi-arid lands. The air was tepid; the sun hot. ”

“ The smell of broiling and frying and boiling arises in the air. By the dancing flame of the campfire you eat your third dinner for the day—in the mountains all meals are dinners, and formidable ones at that. The curtain of blackness draws down close. Through it shine stars, loom mountains cold and mist-like in the moon. You tell stories. You smoke pipes. After a time the pleasant chill creeps down from the eternal snows. Some one throws another handful of pine-cones on the fire. Sleepily you prepare for bed. The pine-cones flare up, throwing their light in your eyes. ”

“ Therefore the solution may lie in geological change or climatic change, such as may have altered the whole aspect of the land’s fertility. If sands have swept in from the desert seas that bound Aïr, to pile up gradually at the base of the [188] range through centuries of time and smother forests of acacia and other plant life which may have been there, then the land has suffered a great loss (I have crossed the edge of the eastern plain below Baguezan mountains, where there are still considerable numbers of acacias close in to the margin where mountain rock terminates) ”

“ For when you descend you find that the tape-wide trickle of water seen from above has become a river with profound darkling pools and placid stretches and swift dashing rapids; that the dark green sluggish flow in the cañon-bed has disintegrated into a noble forest with great pine-trees, and shaded aisles, and deep dank thickets, and brush openings where the sun is warm and the birds are cheerful, and groves of cottonwoods where all day long softly, like snow, the flakes of cotton float down through the air. ”

“ These are not considered prejudicial to health, since both the natives and the whites sleep in the open air with perfect impunity. While this equable and bland temperature prevails throughout the lower country, the peaks and ridges of the vast mountains by which it is dominated, are covered with perpetual snow. This renders them discernible at a great distance, shining at times like bright summer clouds, at other times assuming the most aerial tints, and always forming brilliant and striking features in the vast landscape. ”

“ All day yesterday it was clearing up, and towards evening there came a great wind and swept the sky clear during the night of everything but stars; and when I woke this morning there was the familiar golden patch on the wall again, and I knew the day was to be beautiful.
And so it has been, with the snow come much lower down the mountains, and the still air very fresh. Things sparkle; and one feels like some bright bubble of light oneself. Actually even Mrs. Barnes has almost been like that,—has been, for her, astonishingly, awe-inspiringly gay. ”

“ The air tastes cold, but the sun is warm. The great spring humming and promise is in the air. And a few thousand feet higher you wallow over the surface of drifts while a winter wind searches your bones. ”

“ Barnes and Dolly when I go back to England? The weather was a little fidgety to-day and yesterday, a little troubled, like a creature that stirs fretfully in its sleep, and it set me thinking. For once the change really begins at this time of the year it doesn't stop any more. It goes on through an increasing unpleasantness winds, rain, snow, blizzards—till, after Christmas, the real winter begins, without a cloud, without a stir of the air, its short days flooded with sunshine, its dawns and twilights miracles of colour. ”

“ Across the calm heavens the murk of flying atmosphere—I have always maintained that if you looked closely enough you could SEE the wind—the dim, hardly-made-out, fine debris fleeing high in the air;—these faintly hinted at intense movement rushing down through space. ”

“ These trees do not sway to the wind, their trunks are constructed to stand solid. Their branches do not bend and murmur, for they too are rigid in fiber. Their fine thread-like needles may catch the breeze's whisper, may draw together and apart for the exchange of confidences as do the leaves of other trees, but if so, you and I are too far below to distinguish it. All about, the other forest growths may be rustling and bowing and singing with the voices of the air; the Sequoia stands in the hush of an absolute calm. ”

“ There they are, all over the mountain fields, flowering in greater profusion the further the month moves towards winter.
This particular field of them was so beautiful that with one accord Dolly and I sat down to look. One doesn't pass such beauty by. I think we sat quite half an hour drinking in those crocuses, and their sunny plateau, and the way the tops of the pine trees on the slope below stood out against the blue emptiness of the valley. We were most content. The sun was so warm, the air of such an extraordinary fresh purity. Just to breathe was happiness. ”

“ And I hold this belief because during the dry season I cannot imagine a more barren country than Aïr in all the world: mountain after mountain of bare rock and far-reaching lowlands of nothing but dark gravel-covered ground, bleak as a ploughed field in winter time, except for scant rifts of green along shallow sandy river-beds or close under mountain slopes. Without doubt Aïr is bleak almost as the veriest desert: the one a vast lifeless scene of rock and boulder and pebble, the other great wastes of sand. ”

“ Contemplating the lace-like fabric of streams outspread over the mountains, we are reminded that everything is flowing—going somewhere, animals and so-called lifeless rocks as well as water. Thus the snow flows fast or slow in grand beauty-making glaciers and avalanches; the air in majestic floods carrying minerals, plant leaves, seeds, spores, with streams of music and fragrance; ”

“ Its flight in the upper regions of the air is really sublime, extending its immense wings, and wheeling slowly and majestically to and fro, seemingly without exerting a muscle or fluttering a feather, but moving by mere volition, and sailing on the bosom of the air, as a ship upon the ocean. Usurping the empyreal realm of the eagle, he assumes for a time the port and dignity of that majestic bird, and often is mistaken for him by ignorant crawlers upon the earth. ”

“ Scattered likewise over the breasts of the surrounding mountains, there were heaps of hoary mist, in fantastic shapes, some of them far down into the valley, others high up towards the summits, and still others, of the same family of mist or cloud, hovering in the gold radiance of the upper atmosphere. Stepping from one to another of the clouds that rested on the hills, and thence to the loftier brotherhood that sailed in air, it seemed almost as if a mortal man might thus ascend into the heavenly regions. ”

“ Those valleys, with river-bed in their centre, are wide and very shallow, as is usual everywhere in lowland in Aïr, with little or no banks; merely a slight slope of gravel or rock surroundings, terminating where sand and grass tussocks and trees of the valley begin. Much of the undulating country is of pleasant warm-coloured browns and greys in certain morning and evening lights: wide stretches of ground surface of pebbles of an orderly smallness and sameness, as smoothly and well-arranged as a pebble beach on sea-shore which the tide has just left. ”

“ The climbers numbered five in all, three travellers and two guides, and had started from the Wengern Alp to ascend the Eiger. Nowadays there is a railway to the Wengern Alp, and so thousands of English people are familiar with the appearance of the magnificent group of mountains—the Eiger, the Mönch, and the Jungfrau—which they have before them as they pass along in the train. Suffice it here to say that the way up the Eiger lies over a glacier, partly fed by another high above it, from which, through a narrow, rocky gully, great masses of ice now and again come dashing down. ”

“ From Iferouan one views the rugged western slopes of the great Tamgak range out to the northern extreme, and low hills beyond that tail away in the distance—the last of the hills of Aïr, broken hills that appear to grow more diminutive and scattered as they recede beyond the care of the wild mountain ranges of Aïr. ”

“ The Cape to Cairo railway will have brought the various sources of the Nile within a few days' travel of England; the endless fields of barren ice that surround the poles will have yielded up their secrets; whilst the vast and trackless fastnesses of that stupendous range of mountains which eclipses all others, and which from time immemorial has served as a barrier to roll back the waves of barbaric invasion from the fertile plains of Hindustan—these Himalaya will have been mapped, and the highest points in the world above sea-level will have been visited by man. ”

“ The daring traveller who beards the Winter-king in his own realms meets no more with massive and lofty mountain-crests; a few only of the great chains of Europe and Asia—here the Scandinavian Alps, there the Oural Mountains; still further, at the easternmost extremity of Asia, some scattered summits, which we may consider as belonging to the elevation of the Altai, prolong even to the Arctic shores their cantled and snow-shrouded peaks. ”

“ Even the Aghri Dagh is deprived of many of the qualities essential to a barrier by its narrowness and by the extension of the open plains on either flank. The border between the Lake Van basin and Azerbaijan consists of a line of hills rather than of mountains in the proper sense. The extension of the elevation along the southern confines of the plains of Pasin and of Erzerum takes the form of the lofty rim of the central region of the tableland, and not of a mountain range. ”

“ The mountain being extremely steep and rugged, the path necessarily running into innumerable zigzags to render the ascent at all practicable was cumbered with sharp stones, as was the entire mountain-side. Indeed, this is the characteristic of the range. From summit to base these mountains are thickly covered with fragments crumbled from their massive bodies, which by the action of the weather, intense frosts, &c. are splintered up and strewn with the débris, as though the stone breakers had been busily at work all over the surface, not leaving a square yard vacant. ”

“ The low sandy or sandstone hills, which form the outskirts of the Himalaya, are not, on the road from Firozpur to Simla, anywhere of greater elevation than a few hundred feet. A few miles beyond the entrance, the valley, which has a considerable slope, widens as it approaches the more lofty mountains, and the sandstone cliffs are replaced by rounded hills, probably of a more ancient rock, covered with soil and vegetation. ”

“ It has a glorious view of tremendous wooded ravines, down which green waters glide or tumble, of small lawn-like plateaux among woods, and of green peaks in the foreground, and on the other side of the narrow, sinuous valley, several thousand feet below, 67 there is a confused mass of mountains, among which the snow-slashed southern faces of the peaks of the Zard Kuh and the grand bulk of a mountain of the Faidun range, are the most prominent. ”

“ So far as this ancient pilgrim route concerns Aïr, the old caravan roads are still to be seen with undiminished clearness when they pass over stony ground where no sand accumulates and not a blade of vegetation has root. At such places one may see ten to fifteen single foot-wide paths running parallel to each other camel-width apart, light-coloured clearly defined lines where the dark gravel surface of the natural ground has been brushed aside or powdered down by passage of countless feet. ”

“ The scenery was very grand. Immediately in front rose two enormous mountains looking black like coal, composed of a slate-like stone; and beyond them was a broken range of light sand-coloured mountains, seen through the gorge dividing the former, where I believe our path runs. Right and left of us lies a valley of the usual sterile appearance, huge snow-capped mountains shutting it in. ”

“ From Aurora my road, still parallel with the mountains, though now hidden from them by banks of volcanic hills, climbed a long, wearisome slope from whose summit a glorious panorama of snowy Sierras lay before us. From our feet, steep declivities fell two thousand feet to the level of a wide desert basin, bounded upon the west by long ranks of high, white peaks, and otherwise walled in by chains of volcanic hills, smooth with dull sage flanks, and yet varied here and there by outcropping formations of eruptive rocks and dusky cedar forests. ”

“ Then we emerged on the vast expanse of the glittering Plains, and a sudden sweep of wind made the cold so intolerable that I had to go into a house to get warm. This was the last house we saw till we reached our destination that night. I never saw the mountain range look so beautiful—uplifted in every shade of transparent blue, till the sublimity of Long's Peak, and the lofty crest of Storm Peak, bore only unsullied snow against the sky. Peaks gleamed in living light ”

“ Every one of the numerous little gullies that furrow the mountain-sides has at its lower end a similar little heap of stones. Sometimes a valley among the mountains seems half choked with rocky fragments; and if these were all removed, the valley would be deeper than it is. In some hot countries, where the streams only flow in winter, 214 this is especially the case; for example, every valley, or "wady," in the region of Mount Sinai and Mount Horeb is more or less choked up with boulders and stones of every size, because the stones come down faster than they can be carried away. ”