River Usk

“ They won’t go near it for their lives, and would consider it profane to build a boat. I propose that you and I and your groom should take it in turns to explore, one man swimming, and the other two holding the rope and lighting him.”
Usk agreed, and the first sight of the cave proved to him that Mr Hicks’s precautions were not unnecessary. The river, running swift and dark, lost itself under an overhanging brow of rock, and it required a good deal of nerve to plunge into the blackness within, even when secured by a rope. ”

“ What makes, too, for the exceeding beauty of these particular reaches of the Wye is not alone the lofty hills which press upon its here tempestuous streams, but the further fact that every downward view of the river has for a background the line of the Black Mountains waving at a great height against the skyline. Breaking at length out of its own pent-up channels, and turned back by the formidable barrier before it, which protects the vale of Usk, the Wye now swings to the east and down the broader meadowy vales of Glasbury and Hay ”

“ Brecon, occupying a highly picturesque situation, is the first place of any importance that the Usk comes to in its flight from the mountains. Two streams join the river at this point, the Tarel and the Honddu; and, as the town is ringed completely round with high mountains, it may be said to lie in the bottom of a huge bowl. Near by, the Beacons, twin peaks, the highest mountains in South Wales, tower to the sky, and add grandeur to the beauty of the neighbouring hills. In the reign of good Queen Bess, Churchyard was moved to verse at the sight of Brecon and its surroundings. ”

“ And so he neared the canyon of the Grand Falls without the smallest perturbation.
A mere speck in the immensity of its surrounding the kyak glided on. Here it rocked on a ruffled surface, there it passed, perfectly poised, a ghostly shadow upon a smooth mirror-like surface. The dip of the man’s paddle was precise and rhythmic. Every ounce of strength was in every stroke, and every stroke yielded its full of propulsion. For Usak was a master of river craft, and understood the needs of the journey that still lay ahead of him. ”

“ Styx is not 'a pit,' but a river. The error is Chaucer's; cf. 'Stix, the put of helle,' in Troil. iv. 1540. Observe the expression—'Stygiamque paludem'; Vergil, Aen. vi. 323.
86. I. e. 'rend the sword out of the hands of Hercules, and set Hercules' pillars at Gades a mile further onward.' For the latter allusion, see Ch. vol. ii. p. lv; it may have been taken from Guido delle Colonne. And see Poem VIII (below) , l. ”

“ Jees Uck moved into her grand log-house and dreamed away three golden summer months. Then came the autumn, post-haste before the down rush of winter. The air grew thin and sharp, the days thin and short. The river ran sluggishly, and skin ice formed in the quiet eddies. All migratory life departed south, and silence fell upon the land. The first snow flurries came, and the last homing steamboat bucked desperately into the running mush ice. Then came the hard ice, solid cakes and sheets, till the Yukon ran level with its banks. ”

“ In May and June this prairie is completely covered with water. The Sumass river, from the rapid rise of the Fraser, reverses its course, and flows back into the lake instead of out of it. The lake fills, overflows, and completely floods the lower lands. On the subsidence of the waters, we pitched our tents on the edge of a lovely stream. Wildfowl were in abundance; the streams were alive with fish; the mules and horses revelling in grass kneedeep—we were in a second Eden! ”

“ Below him, rendered invisible by the storm, lay the still bosom of the mountain lake with shore ice supporting its white burden. The bulk of the water still resisted the grip of winter, but with every passing day, every hour, the spread of shore ice was encroaching.
The grey curtain of falling snow was impenetrable even to the accustomed eyes of Usak. The world about him was silent, and windless, and alive with that desolate threat which drives man to despair. He had reached the mouth of the Valley of the Fire Hills, and, blinded by the sudden snow-storm, had sought what shelter he could find. ”

“ Say that I had walked and wandered by unknown roads, and suddenly, after climbing a gentle hill, had seen before me for the first time the valley of the Usk, just above Newbridge. I think it was on one of those strange days of summer when the sky is at once grey and luminous that I achieved this adventure. There are no clouds in the upper air, the sky is simply covered with a veil which is, as I say, both grey and luminous, and there is no breath of wind, and every leaf is still. ”

“ The girls, however, were not troubled with any such scruples, and set to work to pick in hot haste.
"I'm going down by the stream," said Ulyth; "one gets far the best there if one hunts about, and I brought my stick."
Rona, Addie and Lizzie joined her, and with considerable difficulty scrambled down to the water's edge. For those who preferred quality to quantity, and who did not mind getting torn by briers, this was undoubtedly the place to come. In pockets of fine river-sand, their roots stretching into the stream, grew the very biggest and finest of the snowdrops. ”

“ On looking back, below me is spread out the narrow, winding valley, between its two mountains, widening at that point into an extensive bar, through which, on account of the many dams, canals, and other obstructions, the tortured river seems to have infinite difficulty in forcing its way. There is also the collection of tents, and the miners engaged in cooking, and collected in small groups about their camp-fires, for it is a cool morning. There stand the wrecks of our aqueduct and canal; the bare half channel of the river, and the surface of the bar scarred and pitted over. ”

“ The upland declines a little, the valley broadens towards the sea, as the river changes into an estuary. Between the one and the other there is no very hard and fast division; the ground by the side of each is low, but as a rule by the river it is just high enough to be naturally fit for cultivation, while by the estuary it is a marsh. But as the ground becomes more salubrious, the channel becomes more shallow, and at one place, a short distance above the confluence of a tributary stream from the north—the Lea—this change in the character of the valley is a little more rapid than elsewhere. ”

“ The wonder is where all the water comes from. But the river is fed by more than six thousand square miles of territory. From both sides the little brooks come dashing in with their supply. At intervals a larger stream, reaching away back among the mountains like a hand with many fingers to gather
“The filtered tribute of the rough woodland,” delivers its generous offering to the main current.
The names of the chief tributaries of the Ristigouche are curious. There is the headstrong Metapedia, and the crooked Upsalquitch, and the Patapedia, and the Quatawamkedgwick. ”

“ Two or three hundred yards has been the limit of the view ahead, as the stream swerves gracefully from the slightest rise of land, and flows now east, now north, now east, now south again. So long a stretch of navigable water is not common on the Delectable River, and we make the most of it, moving leisurely, and prisoning the everchanging picture with the imperfect camera of the eyes. ”

“ In a canal-like stream of uniform width, which gives little chance for eddies or slack water—and the upper Yukon has many long stretches that answer to this description—every thing goes along smoothly enough until along toward evening, when the party wishes to go into camp while the river is tearing along at four or five miles an hour. ”

“ This stream is an important branch of the Grand, entering it at the foot of the great valley, after that river has passed around the end of the Uncompahgre Plateau, and just as it plunges into the course of canons by which it passes the Sierra la Sal.
Traveling along the crest-line of the Uncompahgre Plateau, one is interested in observing how sharply the crest-line serves as a water-parting. The drainage toward the west heads in the crest, without cutting it at all. The bluff-wall is everywhere continuous. ”

“ A tiny stream, a pixy’s river, slips from beneath a bowlder in a wood long known, and leads through thicket, glade, and clearing to a terrifying land, desolated by ancient fires and strewn with blackened stones and charred boughs. The place itself is athirst, and the dreamer kneels to drink. The tiny stream is dark, like a deep water, and bitter cold as if it flowed through ice. A staff thrust down cannot sound its depths. ”

“ A gleam of light falls upon a broad expanse of the estuary beyond that point under which the schooner lies at anchor, and brings out the thickly wooded banks of an opposite shore, causing us to note the fact that, for some reason or other, no timber seems ever to have spread down so far toward the sea on this side of the stream, or where the settlement stands, since nothing but scattered copses of alder- and willow-bushes grow on its suburbs or anywhere else as far as an eye can range up the valley. ”

“ The Ouse, the next, going westward, to cut through the Downs, is a very much larger stream. It breaks through the here narrow but lofty chalk range some five miles from the sea at Lewes, and then winds through the meadows as a tidal river{214} to Newhaven—a stretch of country familiar enough to every one using this route to the Continent. The cleft in the Downs made by the Ouse below the ancient and picturesque town of Lewes is one of the boldest and most precipitous scenes of its kind in the whole chalk system. ”

“ In the wet season, it overflows the country far and wide, sometimes to a breadth of 20 m., for long distances, and for 400 m. up, as far as Santa Isabella, is a succession of lagoons, full of long islands and intricate channels, and the slope of the country is so gentle that the river has almost no current. But just before reaching the Uaupes there is a long series of reefs, over which it violently flows in cataracts, rapids and whirlpools. ”

“ It flung the hills apart to join the larger stream which it meets at right angles at the Town Bridge, and the last mile of its course is through a beautiful small gorge, in a succession of falls, now compacted into the eight dams which turn our mills.
Above the falls, though it breaks into occasional rapids, its course is quieter, and as you travel towards the setting sun, your canoe follows a peaceful stream, running for the most part through woods.
The country along the Acushticook is broken and hilly, woods or open pastures full of boulders and junipers. ”

“ When full they are inevitably muddy, and when empty are very empty indeed; lifeless, and mute at the best, at the worst actually dry. The river of low-country birth acquires, in short, neither{2} character nor quality worthy of consideration till as a full-grown stream it can trace a shining coil in the valley, or reflect the shadow of spire, bridge or mill, of willow or poplar. ”

“ The water-partings are characteristically level uplands, often with shallow depressions, once lakes, and some of them still so. The valleys of the greatest streams are huge shallow troughs. The valley floor of the North Platte in the foot-hills, the flood-plain of an older river, is in places 700 ft. ”

“ From the summit another rivulet trickles away to the south, and finds its way through a frightful tamarack swamp, and through woods scarred by ruthless lumbering, to Mud Pond, a quiet body of water, with a ghastly fringe of dead trees, upon which people of grand intentions and weak vocabulary are trying to fix the name of Elk Lake. The descent of the pass on that side is precipitous and exciting. The way is in the stream itself; and a considerable portion of the distance we swung ourselves down the faces of considerable falls, and tumbled down cascades. ”

“ The following morning we swung around the butte and headed south by a little east, a course that would take us to the junction of Elk River and the Bighorn, my companions said. We crossed the Musselshell River at noon or a little earlier, and that night slept upon the open plain. The weather continued fine. The next morning also broke clear and warm and cloudless. We started on at sunrise and, topping a ridge, Mad Plume pointed to some dark breaks away off to the south, and told [Pg 206] me that they marked the course of Elk River. ”

“ At about nine miles from Skull Creek, which I supposed to be in latitude 21 degrees 42 minutes, the Isaacs breaks through a long range of sandstone hills; beyond which the country opens into plains with detached patches of scrub, and downs, with "devil-devil" land and its peculiar vegetation, and into very open forest. The river divides into two branches, one coming from the eastward, and the other from the northward. ”

“ We had made our camp in the bend of an enormous river, wide and shallow and unbridged; the river Kadarin, traditionally a point of no return for humans on Darkover. The river is fed by ocean tides and we would have to wait for low water to cross. Beyond the river lay thick forests, and beyond the forests the slopes of the Hellers, rising upward and upward; and their every fold and every valley was filled to the brim with forest, and in the forests lived the trailmen. ”

“ In these views of Ullswater, sublimity and greatness are the predominating characters, though beauty often glows upon the western bank. The mountains are all bold, gloomy and severe. When we saw them, the sky accorded well with the scene, being frequently darkened by autumnal clouds; and the equinoctial gale swept the surface of the lake, marking its blackness with long white lines, and beating its waves over the rocks to the foliage of the thickets above. ”

“ About half the stores were put on the deck, the raft swung by ropes into the swift current of the stream so as to float it well out into the lake, and as the rude sail was spread to the increasing wind, the primitive craft commenced a journey that was destined to measure over thirteen hundred miles before the rough ribs of knots and bark were laid to rest on the great river, nearly half a thousand miles of whose secrets were given up to geographical science through the medium of her staunch and trusty bones. ”