Pontine Marshes

“ In autumn this rich grass becomes russet-brown, and a melancholy hue clothes the slopes which environ the Eternal City. The Alban Mount, when seen from a distance, clothed as it is with forests, vineyards, and villas, resembles a green island rising out of a sombre waste of waters. In the Pontine marshes, where the air is so poisonous in the warm months that it is dangerous, and felt as oppressive even by the passing traveller, the prolific powers of nature are still more remarkable. Vegetation there springs up with the rapidity, and flourishes with the luxuriance, of tropical climates. ”

“ On, on sped Godolphin. Night broke over him as he traversed the Pontine Marshes. There, the malaria broods over its rankest venom: solitude hath lost the soul that belonged to it: all life, save the deadly fertility of corruption, seems to have rotted away: the spirit falls stricken into gloom; a nightmare weighs upon the breast of Nature; and over the wrecks of Time, Silence sits motionless in the arms of Death. ”

“ Another danger arises during dry weather. It happens then occasionally that the parched vegetation is ignited through the carelessness of herdsmen; the fire communicates itself to the turfy soil, and the latter smoulders until the subsoil water is reached. In this manner tracts of land which were looked upon as secure against every inundation are converted into marsh. During the greater portion of the year the Pontine Marshes present the appearance of a plain covered with herbage and flowers, and it is matter for surprise that a country so fertile should be without inhabitants. ”

“ Love mankind? Interest in posterity? Bless my soul, Cousin Peter, I hope you have no prospectuses in your pockets; no schemes for draining the Pontine Marshes out of pure love to mankind; no propositions for doubling the income-tax, as a reserve fund for posterity, should our coal-fields fail three thousand years hence. Love of mankind! ”

“ Monte Circello, with the opposite promontory of Terracina, where the Pontine Marshes terminate, in all probability consists also of a system of chalk rocks.
We left the sea coast, and soon reached the charming plain of Fondi. Every one must admire this little spot of fertile and well cultivated land, enclosed with hills, which themselves are by no means wild. Oranges, in great numbers, are still hanging on the trees; the crops, all of wheat, are beautifully green; olives are growing in the fields, and the little city is in the bottom. ”

“ The form of the lake and of its high precipitous banks indicates plainly that it has been formed by the falling in of a burnt-out crater.
The road from Albano to the little dirty town of Velletri, where we took up our first night-quarters, presents a great variety of scenery.
On the second day we crossed the Pontine marshes, which extend from Velletri to Terracina, a distance of four and twenty Italian miles. We did not find them so desolate and barren as we expected, for one has always a sight of the mountains on the left, and here and there of even a few patches of cultivated land. ”

“ The Mersea channel gleamed like a belt of silver, not a ripple was on the water on the west side of the causeway, and but slight flapping wavelets, driven by the north-east wind, played with the tangles on the piles on the other side of the Strood.
She reached the island of Mersea by the causeway, now dry, and began to ascend the hill. Once she turned and looked back. She could see the Ray rising above the marshes, bathed in moonlight, patched with coal black shadows cast by the ancient thorn trees, and the farm buildings. ”

“ A SECRET OF TELEGRAPH HILL
CAPTAIN JIM'S FRIEND
THE HERITAGE OF DEDLOW MARSH. I.
The sun was going down on the Dedlow Marshes. The tide was following it fast as if to meet the reddening lines of sky and water in the west, leaving the foreground to grow blacker and blacker every moment, and to bring out in startling contrast the few half-filled and half-lit pools left behind and forgotten. The strong breath of the Pacific fanning their surfaces at times kindled them into a dull glow like dying embers. ”

“ Walland Marsh is sectored by the Kent Ditch, which draws huge, straggling diagrams here, to preserve ancient rights of parishes and the monks of Canterbury. Dunge Marsh runs up into the apex of the triangle at Dunge Ness, and adds to itself twenty feet of shingle every year. Romney Marsh is the sixth continent and the eighth wonder of the world.
The three marshes are much alike; indeed to the foreigner they are all a single spread of green, slatted with watercourses. ”

“ They went down to the beach and he helped her into the boat. Her maid sat by her side, and he rowed them across with a few powerful strokes.
"Storm and sunshine," he remarked, "follow one another here as swiftly as in any corner of the world. Yesterday we had wind and thunder and rain. To-day, look! The sky is cloudless, the birds are singing everywhere upon the marshes, the waves can do no more than ripple in upon the sands. Will you walk across the marshes, Miss Jeanne, or will you come to the village and wait while I send for a carriage?" ”

“ Away below one's feet, almost at the bottom of the hill, the Marsh begins, and spreads and spreads in a mighty crescent that sweeps about the sea, the Marsh dotted with the church towers of forgotten mediæval towns and breaking at last into the low, blue hills of Winchelsea and Hastings; east hangs France, between the sea and the sky, and round the north, bounding the wide prospectives of farms and houses and woods, the Downs, with their hangers and chalk pits, sustain the passing shadows of the sailing clouds. ”

“ The tide was well up, half the Marsh had already vanished, and the little creek where he had moored his skiff was now an empty shining river. The water was everywhere—fringing the tussocks of salt grass with concentric curves of spume and drift, or tumultuously tossing its white-capped waves over the spreading expanse of the lower bay. The low thunder of breakers in the farther estuary broke monotonously on the ear. ”

“ The marshes, the distant frontier of banked-up houses, and even the long railway viaducts that stretch like monstrous centipedes across the levels, look interesting, and the water-loving willows and graceful clumps of the bushy poplar are not wanting to add something of beauty to the scene. There is, too, if you do but choose to look for it, a kind of skulking romance to be found on the Essex side of the Lea, where the rustic cottages come down to the fringe of the marsh; their faces away from, their back gardens towards it. ”

“ If Mersea was a trap, how much more so the Ray! The Sharlands had not even a lock to their door. No one was ever seen on the island after dark save those who dwelt there, for the hill was surrounded on all sides, save where girt by the sea, by a labyrinth of creeks and pools. A robber there would be like a fly in a cobweb, to be caught at once. The sheep were allowed to ramble all over the marsh and saltings, they could thread their way; and it was only when the moon was full or new, and the wind in the south-east, that the shepherd drove them into fold till the waters subsided. ”

“ The common Mallows grow in every county of this land. The common Marsh-mallows in most of the salt marshes, from Woolwich down to the sea, both on the Kentish and Essex shores, and in divers other places of this land. ”

“ Here marshes, diversified by occasional hammocks of timber dotting their uninteresting wastes; there humble habitations of whites and blacks appearing at intervals in the forest growth. As I was destitute of a finished chart of the Coast Survey, after rowing along one side of Hutchinson's Island I became bewildered in the maze of creeks which penetrate the marshes that lie between Bennett's Point and the coast. ”

“ Right and left lay the marshes, 17 feet at least below our vessel’s water-line, and consequently some 31 feet below the level of our eye, stretching their monotonous level far away up to the stems of the trees which skirted the rising grounds. Between them the river seemed buoyed up, as in a basin, by the river walls: over these, in a dozen places between Erith and Woolwich, cataracts were pouring down the inner sides of the slopes, and slowly pushing a sheet of water further and further up into the marshes. ”

“ The channel south of these marshes, called the Tollesbury Fleet, was so full of banks and islets as to be difficult to navigate, and more than once a revenue boat had got entangled and grounded there, when in pursuit of a smuggled cargo, which the officers had every reason to believe was at that time being landed on the Red Hall marshes, and carted into Salcot and Virley with the farmer's horses. ”

“ It would be tedious to relate how, after sticking on invisible oyster-beds and mud-flats, and losing our way among the creeks, at two o'clock we found ourselves about one hundred [Pg 136] yards from the north end of the island; and how, since it was too late to try to reach the wharf on the east side, even had we been sure of the way, the two Fifty-fourth boys and myself got out of the boat and essayed to cross upon the marsh. Such a marsh! We have marshes at the North, but they are as dry land in comparison. ”

“ The moon had risen, the tide was half up. Whatever sign or trace of alien footprint or occupation had been there was already smoothly obliterated; even the configuration of the land had changed. A black cape had disappeared, a level line of shore had been eaten into by teeth of glistening silver. The whole dark surface of the Marsh was beginning to be streaked with shining veins as if a new life was coursing through it. Part of the open bay before the Fort, encroaching upon the shore, seemed in the moonlight to be reaching a white and outstretched arm towards the nest of the Kingfisher. ”

“ The neighborhood of a marsh is sure to be exposed to late spring and early autumnal frosts, but they cease to be feared after it is drained, and this is particularly observable in very cold climates, as, for example, in Lapland. [Footnote: "The simplest backwoodsman knows by experiences that all cultivation is impossible in the neighborhood of bogs and marshes. Why is a crop near the borders of a marsh out off by frost, while a field upon a hillock, a few stone's throws from it, is spared "—Lars Levi Laestadius, Om Uppoldingar Lappmarrken, pp. 69, 74.] ”

“ Thus a strain of wild, restless, law-defying gipsy blood entered the veins of the Essex marshland populations, and galvanised into new life the sluggish and slimy liquid that trickled through the East Saxon arteries. Adventurers from the Low Countries, from France, even from Italy and Spain—originally smugglers, settled on the coast, generally as publicans, in league with the owners of the contraband vessels, married and left issue. ”

“ Two streams, the Braint and Cefni, rise in the inland marshes, and enter the sea on either side of Newborough Warren; the latter was once a trickle through a great marsh, now it is a broad, embanked tidal stream, draining the whole of the vast Malldraeth Marsh. Much of this land is under cultivation, rich, fertile soil ”

“ This latter is a hill of gravel rising from the heart of the Marshes, crowned with ancient thorntrees, and possessing, what is denied the mainland, an unfailing spring of purest water. At ebb, the Ray can only be reached from the old Roman causeway, called the Strood, over which runs the road from Colchester to Mersea Isle, connecting formerly the city of the Trinobantes with the station of the count of the Saxon shore. But even at ebb, the Ray is not approachable by land unless the sun or east wind has parched the ooze into brick ”

“ The burnt hills are built up on the old shingle of the shore, with no intervening line of vegetable matter, the growth of the marsh has been later and has risen about their bases and has partly buried them. ”

“ Traces of these marshes still exist after two thousand years of cultivation, and in the very earliest times they must have presented a most formidable obstacle to travel. The one group which lies to the east of the valley of the Rother is still in part undrained; the other, which forms a mass of tidal creeks and inlets round about Hayling Island, Bosham, and Chichester harbour, is almost equally difficult. These two, then, set the limits of the county; for marsh is, of all obstacles, the most considerable at the beginning of a civilisation, as it is the least remembered in the height of one. ”

“ When the first of them came to the place where the marsh-lurkers had been, they found lying athwart the causeway, one on each side, two dead porkers, two dead dogs, two hares, and in the very midst a fox, these also dead. The first men wonder at this, and get off their horses and handle the carcasses; then they call others to look at them; and some deem this the work of Dwarfs or Fairies or such like; and others say this is a sign or token of the up-country folk to rise upon them, and that they had best send men a-foot to search the marsh ”

“ And it was at such a time, when light and water were both fading, and the blackness of the Marsh was once more reasserting itself, that a small boat was creeping along one of the tortuous inlets, at times half hiding behind the bank like a wounded bird. As it slowly penetrated inland it seemed to be impelled by its solitary occupant in a hesitating uncertain way, as if to escape observation rather than as if directed to any positive bourn. Stopping beside a bank of reeds at last, the figure rose stoopingly, and drew a gun from between its feet and the bottom of the boat. ”