Pamlico Sound

“ The male begins, the female takes up her part, and then with marvellous strength and spirit they pour forth a torrent of strangely-contrasted sounds—some bassoon-like in their depth and volume, some like drumbeats, and others, long, clear, and ringing. It is the loudest animal-sound of the pampas, and its jubilant martial character strongly affects the mind in that silent melancholy wilderness. ”

“ Vincent's Sound and Apalachicola Bay met our gaze, while beyond them were spread the waters of St. George's Sound.
Following the coast on our left, numerous reefs of large and very fat oysters continually obstructed our progress. We gathered a bushel with our hands in a very few minutes; but as the wind commenced to blow most spitefully, and the heavy forests of palms on the low shore offered a pleasant shelter, we disembarked about sunset in a magnificent grove of palmetto-trees, spending a pleasant evening in feasting upon the delicious bivalves, roasted and upon the half shell. ”

“ Leaving the diggers on shore to continue their prospecting, the steamer steamed to Milford Sound.
It must be with extreme diffidence that any one would address himself to the duty of describing such a sight as that which is presented by the magnificent scenery of Milford Sound. There is a double difficulty to deal with. It is not easy to convince people, and especially those who may have “looked down Vesuvius,” or, for that part, looked down upon the whole world, and “found nothing in it,” that in even indicating its outline there is not a straining of language to achieve an empty effect. ”

“ A broad and beautiful sound, or strait, divides this lonely and mountainous island from Pomona, and in the centre of that sound lies, like a tablet composed of emerald, the beautiful and verdant little island of Græmsay. On the distant Mainland is seen the town or village of Stromness, the excellence of whose haven is generally evinced by a considerable number of shipping in the roadstead, and, from the bay growing narrower, and lessening as it recedes, runs inland into Pomona, where its tide fills the fine sheet of water called the Loch of Stennis. ”

“ Pamela went the usual way, across the lawns, out by the wicket that led to the beach, and very slowly up the steep cliff road past Crown Hill lodge gates and on up to Hawksdown. A sea fog has the effect of producing a feeling of loneliness. It cuts you off, and it makes voices and distant noises sound different. She went on till she reached the summit, and arriving there, went along cautiously towards the cliff edge, to see if the Messenger might be within sight. ”

“ We know further that if two different lines of waves run along with one another, their crests and hollows fall together, and their crests become as high again and their hollows as deep again. So two tones from different sources of sound are twice as strong when they are both equally high, and a new tone of the same height added to them will still further increase the sound. But when two agitations of the surface of the water so move that the crests of one fall into the hollows of the other, their movements neutralize each other. ”

“ On days when the echoes were powerful, I have seen the southern cumuli mirrored in the waveless ocean, in forms almost as definite as the clouds themselves. By no possible application of the law of incidence and reflection could the echoes from such a sea return to the shore; and if we accept for a moment a statement which Prof. Henry seems to indorse, that sound-waves of great intensity, when they impinge upon a solid or liquid surface, do not obey the law of incidence and reflection, but “roll along the surface like a cloud of smoke,” it only increases the difficulty. ”

“ In a short time we had rounded it and were finally out of Melville Bay, a departure which caused no sorrow on the part of any of us. The body of water which we had now entered was known as Smith Sound, a name given it by William Baffin in honor of one of his supporters. It stretches from Cape York to beyond Etah where it opens out into Kane Basin. Usually the Sound is free from pack ice except on the western side where a heavy stream of it flows to the southward. ”

“ To-day my assistant, hidden by the fog, walked up to the Watermen’s Boathouse sounding his whistle; and I walked along the opposite side of the Serpentine, clearly appreciating for a time that the line joining us was oblique to the axis of the river. Coming to a point which seemed to be exactly abreast of him, I marked it; and on the following day, when the fog had cleared away, the marked position was found to be perfectly exact. When undisturbed by echoes, the ear, with a little practice, becomes capable of fixing with great precision the direction of a sound. ”

“ According to Captain Palmer, an English traveler, the sand of this hill possesses the marvellous property of giving out musical sounds whenever it is set in motion. The sandy slope is two hundred feet in height, the sand being very much the same as that in the desert around. When any considerable quantity of this sand is set in motion, it is seen to move in undulations, and, simultaneously, a singular sound is heard, which is first feeble, but may be heard at some distance when it has attained its maximum intensity. ”

“ The following extract from Dr Hector’s account of Milford Sound shows the probable mode of its formation:—‘Three miles from the entrance of the Sound it becomes contracted to the width of half-a-mile, and its sides rise perpendicularly from the water’s edge sometimes for 2000 ft., and then slope at a high angle to the peaks that are covered with perpetual snow. The scenery is quite equal to the finest that can be enjoyed by the most difficult and toilsome journey into the Alps of the interior ”

“ The wind always howled around the lamasery, up so high. From what we knew about acoustics and how they shaped the old phonograph horns to increase sound amplification, we worked it out that we were in a sort of wind-tunnel or horn, and it didn’t seem that they opened any rock at the image or we would have heard it. If the far end of the tunnel opened, and wind howled in and through the hollow image, it could make those weird howls, high and low, moans and screeches. So we followed the tunnel down, and by using Tip’s pencil flashlight we located a lever, and risked making the sound. ”

“ I should go even further than I went just now, and say that the voice of the gondolier is in fact for audibility the dominant or rather the only note of Venice. There is scarcely another heard sound, and that indeed is part of the interest of the place. There is no noise there save distinctly human noise ”

“ Eight layers of the calico employed in these experiments, stretched on a wire frame and placed close together as a kind of pad, may be taken to represent a dense acoustic cloud. Such a pad, placed at the proper angle beyond N, cuts off the sound, which in its absence reaches f′, to such an extent that the flame f′, when not too sensitive, is thereby stilled, while f is far more powerfully agitated than by the reflection from a single layer. With the source of sound close at hand, the echoes from such a pad would be of insensible duration. ”

“ Outside each uninspiring town was an ostentatious city of the dead; in the sodden fields were flocks of sheep, cattle, and horses, fat as barrels, some snorting away at sight of the train, others gazing disdainfully after it. In many places the pampa was flooded, sometimes for miles, the shallow temporary lakes dotted with wild ducks, the roads mere rivers of mud, with only the tops of the fence-posts out of water, in which dismal looking animals were huddled up to their bellies, or crowded together on little muddy islands. ”

“ If the Sonorous Body be plac'd near Water, the Sound will easily be convey'd, yet mollified; as Experience teacheth us from a Ring of Bells near a River, and a great Gun shot off at Sea, which yet differ much in the strength, and softness and continuance, or propagation of their Sounds, from the same at Land, where the Sound is more harsh and more perishing, or much sooner decays.
3. In a Plain a Voice may be heard at a far greater distance than in uneven Ground. ”

“ I would venture to affirm that at Cape Race calm days might be found in which the range of the sound will be less than one-fourth of what this notice states it to be. Such publications ought to be without a trace of exaggeration, and furnish only data on which the mariner may with perfect confidence rely. My object in extending these observations over so long a period was to make evident to all how fallacious it would be, and how mischievous it might be, to draw general conclusions from observations made in weather of great acoustic transparency. ”

“ She works her way out like a sheepdog working his way out of a flock of sheep, or like a boat through pack-ice. We are on the open basin. The rower stands up and pushes the oars from him. He gives a long, melancholy cry to someone on the quay. The water goes chock-chock against the urging bows. The wind is chill. The fantastic peaks behind Palermo show half-ghostly in a half-dark sky. The dawn seems reluctant to come. Our steamer still smokes her cigarette—meaning the funnel-smoke—across there. So, one sits still, and crosses the level space of half-dark water. ”

“ The Pampa plains, immense and limitless, those mysterious sea-like horizons of the solid land, stimulate the fancy like the unknown, and cause her to express herself in glowing language and exaggerated ideas. ”

“ In his more artistic moments, Pamphilon was fond of finishing the sound-holes with a drawn-out curl, resembling the volute of a scroll; and the bottom curve of the sound-hole runs out at something like a right angle to the axis of the fiddle. ”

“ Just in that moment when the sun has all but freed himself from the horizon, the pampas, in weather like this, is a golden and a wonderful and a living thing; comfortable as the light of a fire, the light of the sun destroys desolation and the bleakness of distance and almost the sense of loneliness.
Luggard had a month before him, perhaps more, to be lived out in this place. Here on the pampas he had to face Nature and Time without a companion and without a roof to cover him, and—at first sight, without an occupation to engage his mind. ”

“ Blue it was towards the eastern horizon, with one dark, unbroken canopy of clouds moving fast away overhead towards the Cordilleras.
Back rolled the great cloud-curtain, and presently out shone the glorious sun, and the scene around us was now beautiful but dazzling in the extreme.
We rode on through the Pampas all that day. Whenever we came to a lagoon—and we passed many—we noticed that the water looked as black as ink. It is the same with the sea in the Arctic regions, the contrast in colour accounting for the optical illusion. ”

“ Above the flat desert is an enormous bowl of clear, transparent sky and one looks far away to distances that seem endless. At sunrise and sunset the effects of light upon the sky and pampa are of a beauty never seen but in expanses such as these. I have watched the sky in an Antofagasta nitrate pampa when, as the sun fell swiftly, all the arch flushed with rose, and quickly flooded with sheets of purest violet while the orange and umber pampa took on deep amethyst shadows ”

“ We may be riding over the flat, absolutely barren pampa, or plain, floored with nothing but fragments of clinkstone, eroded by the ever-drifting sand and unrestful wind, gleaming in the metallic sunlight, for no shower of rain ever visits this wilderness, a place where we might think Nature has nothing to offer of use or profit. But we should be mistaken. An excavation will reveal the sheet of white salts beneath, deposited in geological ages past by marine or lake action, under conditions not clearly understood—deposits which cover many miles of territory. ”

“ Everywhere in the neighborhood of these rivers, and the Sound, is timber of excellent quality for lumbering, and in great quantities. The streams flowing into the Sound from the west are in all respects similar to those on the east side, except that they are shorter, and have less bottom-land. They rise in the Olympian Range, and have but a short distance to flow to reach their outlet. ”

“ Blunt. "Yes, a man feels fit and keen here. The air is a tonic to those who are weaklings when they come to the pampas, and many a delicate man have I seen get strong and healthy after a few months. Look at the sky! That is the sort of ceiling we have at night for the greater part of the year. The stars are brilliant, and that crescent of the moon makes the place almost as light as during the day." ”

“ And in summer, the winds which as they pass over the deserts are indeed like the breath of a furnace, long before they reach the city change to a cool and refreshing breeze by traversing as they do the vast tracts of cultivated ground, which, as I have already told you, surround the capital to a very great extent on every side. Palmyra is the very heaven of the body. Every sense is fed to the full with that which it chiefly covets. ”

“ And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.'
I remember the sea-fight far away,
How it thunder'd o'er the tide!
And the dead sea-captains, as they lay
In their graves o'erlooking the tranquil bay
Where they in battle died.
And the sound of that mournful song
Goes through me with a thrill:
'A boy's will is the wind's will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.' ”

“ I have shown you the Pampas alive with the swarms of their new civilisation. We are far enough from the romantic descriptions so dear to story-tellers. We all know now that the redskin of North America bears no resemblance to the portraits painted of him by Chateaubriand or Fenimore Cooper. The Pampas, in full process of evolution, are getting more human and losing their distinctive features. They were once as bare, to quote the joke of a poet, now a member of the Académie Française, "as the speech of an academician"; man has undertaken to raise up orchards, groves, and even forests. ”