Nive

“ To the eyes of the treasure-seeker there affords no fairer sight than Sagartia nivea at home in its native bower, in brownish olive or orange-coloured column, the upper part dotted with suckers, with slender tentacles and rippled disc of opaque white, as it waits with graceful bearing and outspread tentacula “for the meat that will come in due season,” and presents a perfect picture of placid happiness.
But like some individuals, who can judge the mind by the face, the gifted Nivea at our first glance instinctively learns that our appearance bodes no good to him and his. ”

“ He served on the staff in the Peninsula, to which he was appointed in 1812, and commanded a brigade at the battles of Vittoria, Pyrenees, Nivelle, Nive, and Orthes, receiving a cross and three clasps. ”

“ In this nest or hive are packed about eight hundred fishermen with their wives and children, their old fathers and mothers, and other members of the community who do not go in the boats. The fishermen are the most interesting in appearance; it is a relief, a positive pleasure to see in England a people clothed not in that ugly dress which is now so universal, but in one suitable to their own life and work—their ponderous sea-boots and short shirt-shaped oilies of many shades of colour from dirty white and pale yellow to deep reds and maroons. ”

“ The name of the river Taggia is synonymous with Tay, Taw, Tavy; as the Roya is akin to the Irish Rye, the Spanish Riga. The Neva that mingles its waters with the Arrosetta, has a cognate Neva in Russia, a Nahe in Germany, a Never in Wales, and a diminutive Nivelle in France. The brawling Loup does not take its name from a wolf. ”

“ They sat in grey skins on the grey stones. The shadows in the skins repeated the shadows of the weather-beaten, mossy stone. Each saw his companion in his silence and immovability change into a stone image. But in among the rushes swam mighty fishes with rainbow-coloured backs. When the men threw out their hooks and saw the circles spreading among the reeds, it seemed as if the motion grew stronger and stronger, until they perceived that it was not caused only by their cast. A sea-nymph, half human, half a shining fish, lay and slept on the surface of the water. ”

“ The roots of this mundane ash reach as far downwards as its branches do upwards. Its roots, trunk, and branches together thrid the universe, shooting Hela, the kingdom of death, Midgard, the abode of men, and Asgard, the dwelling of the gods, like so many concentric rings. ”

“ To a human being, the cold expanse of water that gleamed like ink in the light of the Nipe's illuminator would have been a barricade as impenetrable as steel. But to the Nipe the tidal pool was simply another of his defenses, for it concealed the only entrance he ever used. He went in after adjusting his scuba mask and began swimming toward the opening that led to the estuary of the sea, his eight strong limbs working in unison in a way that would have been the envy of a rowing team. ”

“ It is a day of incomparable beauty. We see very little labor along the Nile; the crops are maturing. But the whole population comes to the river, to bathe, to sit in the shallows, to sit on the bank. All the afternoon we pass groups, men, women, children, motionless, the picture of idleness. There they are, hour after hour, in the sun. Women, coming for water, put down their jars, and bathe and frolic in the grateful stream. In some distant reaches of the river there are rows of women along the shore, exactly like the birds which stand in the shallow places or sun themselves on the sand. ”

“ I am not accustomed to being so long in the water—my bones are chilled! I will open the shell and you can try your hand as I have done. It is strange down there, and very beautiful, with the coral colored like flowers and the great fish passing close at hand. At first I was a little afraid. Do not let yourself grow discouraged; the shell is hard to see and harder still to wrench off until you learn the trick. Remember that the old divers never look upward—to gaze into the blue water overhead gives one a horror of the depth! ”

“ Captain Nemo pointed to this prodigious heap of shellfish, and I saw that these mines were genuinely inexhaustible, since nature’s creative powers are greater than man’s destructive instincts. True to those instincts, Ned Land greedily stuffed the finest of these mollusks into a net he carried at his side. ”

“ Through these the Nile leaps at once into majestic being, and enters upon its course as a perfect river three hundred yards wide. Standing upon the reverse side of the wall of rock, one's eye may be almost on a plane with the shining levels of the Lake. At your very feet, literally a yard away, a vast green slope of water races downward. Below are foaming rapids, fringed by splendid trees, and pools from which great fish leap continually in the sunlight. ”

“ In short, Niué is nothing more than an atoll hurled bodily out of the sea by some mighty convulsion of the earth's past. One can clearly see that what was once the reef is now a mighty cliff and that the lagoon inside it is now a coral basin, pitched high and dry.
And this hybrid of an island is wonderfully fertile. On the terrace, that I cannot help looking upon as the reef, cocoanuts, bananas, and most other tropical products grow to perfection, while the lagoon—I should say valley—is thickly timbered with ebony and other hard woods. ”

“ The Cove lay in sunshine, its rough stone chimneys and rude slate roofs overgrown with moss and fern, rising rapidly, one above the other, in the fast descending hollow, through which a little stream rushed to the sea,—more quietly than its brother, which, at some space distant, fell sheer down over the crag in a white line of foam, brawling with a tone of its own, distinguishable among all the voices of the sea contending with the rocks. ”

“ Oreads, or mountain nymphs, wandered over the mountains, and their laughter echoed in the valleys. Nereids and oceanids—water nymphs—sported in the waves of the ocean, and, with the tritons, attended Neptune, god of the deep blue sea.
The sunflower concealed the sea nymph Clytie, and lovely Echo was transformed into a voice. The laurel tree, with its glossy green leaves, was but the nymph Daphne, to whom, when fleeing from Apollo, her father, the river god, gave this form. ”

“ The passengers were landed at a projecting rock at the water’s edge, and Craven Black, ordering the seamen to remain where they were until he should send a servant to them, conducted his wife, Neva and the maid, by a narrow, steep and tortuous path, up the precipitous face of the cliff. The dreary night fell before they had gained the ledge, but the soft moonlight flecked their path with gleams of brightness, and at last they stood upon the ledge, high up among the mountains, with the loch lying like a tarnished jewel far below at their feet. ”

“ Racing through the galleries of the Hive, clambering over the rocks upon the shore, one day skating far away across the frozen ocean, the next fishing in the lake that was kept liquid by the heat of the lava-torrent, the two children led a life of perpetual enjoyment. ”

“ Every thing is burnt down at our right hand, and only on the left is the border of the Nile still festooned by reeds and creepers; it is here not above three feet high. The enormous plain, in which is distinguished, from the mast, three lakes at the last point of the Haba to S.S.W., stood, therefore, entirely under water, although we perceive now numerous cattle and a large summer village in the centre. On the left also we see, from the mast, a lake and a village, about half an hour from the right shore. ”

“ When she reached the point at which the path began to descend to the cove, she paused and looked down. The keen glance and alert figure, poised on guard, suggested the idea of a mother bird watching her nest from afar. The tide had gone out sufficiently for the boats to be drawn up on the eight or ten feet of the shelving shore, which was thus laid bare, and the glowing light of the sunset touched in slanting rays the head and hands of an old man seated on a rock and bending over some fishing tackle, which he seemed to be repairing. ”

“ At this critical instant, while we hold our breath, a naked man, whose name I am sorry I cannot give to an admiring American public, appears on the bow with a rope in his teeth; he plunges in and makes for the nearest rock. He swims hand over hand, swinging his arms from the shoulders out of water and striking them forward splashing along like a sidewheeler—the common way of swimming in the heavy water of the Nile. Two other black figures follow him and the rope is made fast to the point of the rock. We have something to hold us against the stream. ”

“ So when the seven-mouthed Nile has receded from the drenched fields and has returned again to its former bed, and the fresh slime has been heated by the sun's rays, farmers as they turn over the lumps of earth find many animate things; and among these some, but now begun, are upon the very verge of life, some are unfinished and lacking in their proper parts, and oft-times in the same body one part is alive and the other still nothing but raw earth. ”

“ The ground is all cultivated about this village, to the foot of the mountains, which is not above four miles; but it is full eight on the west, all overflowed and sown. The Nile is here but shallow, and narrow, not exceeding a quarter of a mile broad, and three feet deep; owing, I suppose, to the resistance made by the island in the middle of the current, and by a bend it makes, thus intercepting the sand brought down by the stream. ”

“ That betokens the Light of the world, which shall shine from every land where a river divides itself in order to flow into the sea. The rivers, you see, are the blood-vessels of the earth, and as these carry blue and red blood alternately, so our land has its Blue Nile and its Red Nile. The Blue Nile is poisonous like dark blood, and the Red is fertilising, life-giving, like red blood. ”

“ No helpful showers the mountain ridge supplies:
When other streams with wintry rains increase,
Then rests the Nile within his banks in peace:
When they in turn scarce trickle through the sand,
Then swells the Nile, and spreads o'er all the land. ”

“ The exceeding grace of the long sweeping curves was enhanced by silvery groves of lime trees and fields of yellow cane. Green as spring earlier in the winter, at this season of harvest Nevis looked like a gold mine turned wrong side out. The “Great Houses,” set in groves of palm and cocoanut, and approached by avenues of tropical trees mixed with red and white cedars, the spires of churches rising from romantic nooks, their heavy tombs lost in a tangle of low feathery palms, gave the human note without which the [Pg 34] most resplendent verdure must pall in time ”

“ But after long weeks the storm ceased, and Father Noah opened the little window in the ark and sent forth the Dove to see whether or not there was land visible on which the ark might find rest. Now after he had sent out the Dove, Noah looked about him at the other birds and animals which crowded around him eagerly, for they were growing very restless from their long confinement, and he said, "Which of you is bravest, and will dare follow our friend the Dove out into the watery world? Ah, here is the Kingfisher. Little mother, you at least, reared among the winds and waters, will not be afraid. ”

“ When the Nile begins to rise, hollow and marshy places near the river are the first to begin to fill, the water trickling through from the river, and as soon as they are flooded they are suddenly full of little fishes. ”

“ The river makes such short bends that we bound every moment against the shore, notwithstanding the very strong fall, and we tear off also a corner of the loose earth. This, as well as the carelessness in steering, causes the vessel to draw water continually. Nine [157] o’clock. We stop at the left shore, near some dome-palms; the water is a little deeper here, as if a broad arm of the Nile, from E.S.E., joins with our narrow one, or we with it. Here also they bring us cotton for sale. Eleven o’clock. We go on with a favourable east wind. ”

“ Its nest was deep down in the bottom of the Lake, out in the center, and out of the nest rushed all the waters which fill the Lake. There are no rivers to feed the Lake, only the waters from the ong's nest. All the waters flow back near the bottom, in great under-currents, and after passing through the meshes of the nest are sent forth again. Every plant and bird and animal that gets into these under-currents, and sometimes the great trout that are swept into the net-like nest are there held fast to furnish food for the ong. ”

“ The marsh, and the fountains, upon comparison with the rise of many of our rivers, became now a trifling object in my sight. I remembered that magnificent scene in my own native country, where the Tweed, Clyde, and Annan rise in one hill; three rivers, as I now thought, not inferior to the Nile in beauty, preferable to it in the cultivation of those countries through which they flow; superior, vastly superior to it in the virtues and qualities of the inhabitants, and in the beauty of its flocks; crowding its pastures in peace, without fear of violence from man or beast. ”

“ Now when the tide was up all these posts and hurdles were covered with water, and as the fish swam up to meet the fresh stream, a great many would sometimes be over the ground inclosed by the weir, searching about for food washed down by the stream, or for the little shrimps and other water creatures that hung about the hurdles, which were a favourite place too with mussels, which cling to such wood-work by thousands. ”