Tiber River

“ Without, ran the Tiber, a noble river of yellow ribbon, wide, and doubtless deep. A bridge spanned it—a high-walled bridge, long and narrow. From the bridge you came out upon a wide plain, the rest of the table: it was easy to see it was a plain, because it was flat, and there were trees on it, and cattle, contributed by an ancient Noah’s Ark. It was all workmanlike and comprehensible, and something like interest kindled in Rex’s eye. ”

“ The road follows the valley of the Tiber, which is bounded by low hills, descending pretty steeply towards the stream; sometimes close to the river, sometimes receding from it, and leaving a wide and fertile plain. In the first part of the way it is well cultivated, but thinly inhabited; farther on, cultivation diminishes, and ceases when we ascend an advancing and conspicuous point of these hills, and descend into the remains of the sacred wood. ”

“ But let him see the Tagus at Toledo, and what he finds is brown rolling mud, pouring solid after the rains, or sluggish and hardly a river after long drought. Let him go down the Tiber, down the Valley of the Tiber, on foot, and he will retain until the last miles an impression of nothing but a turbid mountain torrent, mixed with the friable soil in its bed. Let him approach the Mississippi in the most part of its long course and the novelty will be more striking still. It will not seem to him a river at all (if he be from Northern Europe) ; it will seem a chance flood. ”

“ Take, for instance, the story of the valleys. I can hardly imagine a more delightful task for a lover of geology than to work out the history of the Tiber—an investigation which, from the point of view we are here considering, still remains to be accomplished. Even from any of the hills of Rome it is not difficult to follow some [Pg 347] of the stages of this history. We have seen that the river may have flowed at first south-westward, from its estuary among the Todi hills, across the site of the volcanic district to the sea somewhere north of Civita Vecchia. ”

“ What is true of the hydrology of the Tiber is doubtless more or less true of that of other rivers, and the immense value of natural arrangements which diminish the danger of sudden floods by retaining a large proportion of the precipitation, and of an excessive reduction of river currents in the droughts of summer, by slowly conducting into their beds water accumulated and stored up in subterranean reservoirs in rainy seasons, is too obvious to require to be dwelt upon. ”

“ February 21st.—This morning I took my way through the Porta del Popolo, intending to spend the forenoon in the Campagna; but, getting weary of the straight, uninteresting street that runs out of the gate, I turned aside from it, and soon found myself on the shores of the Tiber. It looked, as usual, like a saturated solution of yellow mud, and eddied hastily along between deep banks of clay, and over a clay bed, in which doubtless are hidden many a richer treasure than we now possess. The French once proposed to draw off the river, for the purpose of recovering all the sunken statues and relics ”

“ Various schemes were suggested at this time for drawing off the stagnant waters, as well as for the future regular drainage of the valley, and small operations for those purposes were undertaken with partial success; but it was feared that the discharge of the accumulated waters into the Tiber would produce a dangerous inundation, while the diversion of the drainage into the Arno would increase the violence of the floods to which that river was very subject, and no decisive steps were taken. ”

“ It is evident that a quantity of earth, sufficient to effect the immense changes I have described in a wide valley more than thirty miles long, if deposited at the outlet of the Tiber, would have very considerably modified the outline of the coast, and have exerted no unimportant influence on the flow of that river, by raising its point of discharge and lengthening its channel. ”

“ Turn all to serpents!"
In the last two passages it may be observed, that the hyperbolical treatment of the two rivers [157] bears some analogy to that of the eisell; and it may also be pointed out, that although one of your correspondents has rashly maintained that the word cannot mean a river because the definite article is omitted before it, Thames, Tiber, and Nile here occur without. Upon the whole it must appear that there is some reason for adopting the motto:
"Flow on, thou shining river." ”

“ It seems as if Horace could not find a more glorious epithet for the Tiber than this, which calls it the river of Mæcenas's ancestors, who came originally from Etruria, where the Tiber has its source. San. ↑ Cæcubum, a town in Campania, not far from Caieta, The wine produced there was much esteemed. Watson. ↑ Mount Formanum, near the city Formiæ, the seat of the Læstrygones, now swallowed up by the sea, and called Golfo di Gaietta. The wine of the place was much valued. Watson. ”

“ Through a soft lap in the wooded chain of Mount Algidus, a bright pellucid stream, after wheeling and fretting among the crags and ledges of the upper valleys, winds its way gently, toward the far-famed Tiber.
Shut in, on every side, except the south, by the lower spurs of the mountain ridge, in which it is so snugly nestled, covered with rich groves of chesnut-trees, and sheltered on the northward by the dark pines of the loftier steeps, it were difficult to conceive a fairer site for a villa, than that sweet vale. ”

“ The fishpond stream is very doleful, and wants to dance with daffodils if they would come and teach it. How happy we are in our native streams. A thunder-storm swelled the Tiber yesterday, and it rolled over its mill weirs in heaps, literally, of tossed water, the size of haycocks, but black brown like coffee with the grounds in it, mixed with a very little yellow milk. In some lights the foam flew like cast handfuls of heavy gravel. The chief flowers here are only broom and bindweed, and I begin to weary for my heather and for my Susie ”

“ If he can manage the streams, he can also the people; for the people also form alternately torrent and maremma, in pestilential fury or pestilential idleness. They also will change into living streams of men, if their Kings literally "lead them forth beside the waters of comfort." Half the money lost by this inundation of Tiber, spent rightly on the hill-sides last summer, would have changed every wave of it into so much fruit and foliage in spring where now there will be only burning rock. ”

“ For all parts are well nourished by never-failing streams, and even where there is most water there are no swamps, for the declivity of the land drains off into the Tiber all the moisture that it receives and cannot itself absorb. ”

“ Of all the towns on the Tiber, so rich in heirlooms of antiquity and art, none can boast such various wealth as this. The moment one leaves the centre of the town, which is built on a table of rock, the narrow streets plunge down on every side like dangerous broken flights of stairs: they disappear under deep cavernous arches, so that if you are below they seem to lead straight up through the darkness to the soft blue heaven, while from above they seem to go straight down into deep cellars, but cellars full of slanting sunshine. ”

“ On Tiber's banks, Tiber, whose waters glide
In slow meanders down to Gaigra's side;
And circling all the horrid mountain round,
Rushes impetuous to the deep profound;
Rolls o'er the ragged rocks with hideous yell;
Collects its waves beneath the earth's vast shell;
There for a while in loud confusion hurl'd,
It crumbles mountains down and shakes the world.
Till borne upon the pinions of the air,
Through the rent earth the bursting waves appear ”

“ Flat slabs of schist, branches, and roots have been inserted into cracks and fissures of the precipice 120 feet above the river, and on these planks, poles, and stones are laid forming a gutter a foot broad, without a scrap of railing, where one must even keep one’s tongue in one’s mouth lest one should lose one’s balance. Of course we traverse this stretch of road, called Tigu-tang, on foot, leaning inwards and supporting ourselves by the rock. We breathe freely again when we are safely over, and the great basin lies before us where, at Linga, two important valleys converge. ”

“ The Tiber rises on the western slope of the Alpe della Luna, in the latitude of Florence. The valley through which it flows, whilst in the heart of the Apennines, is of surpassing beauty; at one time it expands into broad and fertile basins, at others it is hemmed in by precipitous rocks. Below the charming basin of Perugia the Tiber receives the Topino, formed by the confluence of several streams in the old lacustrine basin of Foligno, one of the most delightful districts of all Italy, situated at the foot of the Great Apennines and of the Col Fiorito, which leads across them. ”

“ The Tiber between low, interrupted slopes, some covered with longest most compact green grass, others of brown, unreal tufo, like crumbled masonry, or hollowed into Signorelli-looking grottoes, with deep growths of Judas-tree, broom, and scant asphodels; all green and brown, of such shapes that one wonders whether they also, like so many seeming boulders scattered in their neighbourhood, are not in reality masonry, long destroyed towns. ”

“ How much more awe-inspiring it must have been to men ignorant of the commonest laws of Nature! Well might its channel be regarded as the home of a spirit eager to waylay and destroy the too-venturesome passer-by. Rivers, however, were not always reckoned the enemies of man, for experience showed that they were helpful, as well as hurtful, to him. The Tiber, for instance, was regarded with reverence by the ancient inhabitants of Rome. ”

“ The rate of advance at Fiumicino is estimated at 13 ft. per annum. From Rome to the sea the fall is only 6.5.: 1000. The arm which reaches the sea at Fiumicino is a canal, dug by Claudius and improved by Trajan (see Portus) , which partially silted up in the middle ages, and was reopened for navigation by Paul V. in 1612, 2 1/2 m. long, 80–130 ft. wide, and with a minimum depth of 5 ft. The lower course of the Tiber has been from the earliest ages subject to frequent and severe inundations ”

“ Tigré is said, by the Jesuits, and by M. Le Grande their historian, to be full of mountains, so high that the Alps and Apennines were very inconsiderable in comparison. And suppose it was otherwise, there is no navigable river, indeed no river at all, that runs through Tigré into the Red Sea, and there is the desert of Samhar to pass, where there is no water at all. How is it possible a ship from the coast of Malabar should get up 200 miles from any sea among the mountains of Tigré? ”

“ In the centre of the place women are washing at a circular basin. Idlers follow and gaze at the strangers while they make their declaration to the bargel, or public authority, and submit their effects to the examination of the custom officials. These preliminaries through, our travellers may pass into the city by a street leading around the base of the Pincian Hill, by another going toward the Tiber, both of which have long ceased to exist, or by the well-known Corso. ”

“ Immediately after the union of these two rivers the Tigris enters another mountainous territory formed of sandstone. The gentle curves of the broad and shallow river are transformed into the sharp criss-cross angles of a ravine. The banks are abrupt, often vertical on both sides; and on top of some steep, rocky slopes your eye may discover groves of dark-green palms, and in their shadows the settlements of tribes of Kurds, who in this region are mostly cave-dwellers. ”

“ Its method of progress is simply to drift down the fairly rapid current of the Tigris as far as is required. On reaching the destination, all the wood is sold for what it will fetch to the timber merchants, while the skins are deflated and packed on a donkey for transport up the river, for there is no means of towing the craft back against the stream. ”

“ The names and sources of the different streams forming the Western Tigris—or that part of the upper river which runs, roughly speaking, from Diarbekr to the junction with the Eastern Tigris, about 50 miles north-north-west from Jezíra Ibn Omar—are given by Consul Taylor as the Arganeh M'adan and the Dibeneh Su, uniting at Ammaneh castle; the Ambar Su, rising at Heyni; the Batman Su, formed by the Kulp, the Kaushan, and the Sarum, rising north and north-west of Nerjiki ”

“ They say it was a steady constant stream of water, and it did not gush out of the earth in the manner that a natural spring does; the spring must therefore be at some distance. If this view is correct, it would be comparatively easy to turn the stream into a drain under the Clivus Scauri, and into the one made by the Municipality about 1865, under the road near the church of S. Gregory, between the Cœlian and the Palatine, and to carry it in that manner to the Tiber. ”

“ We groped a tedious way along the sinuous Tigris, missing by a foot or two a down-river steamer and its lashed barges, making fair headway against the swirling waters which swept past us with the speed of a millstream. The current carried us from side to side, first bumping one bank, and then cannoning against the opposite one, until it seemed as if the stout lashings of our captive barges must be torn away. Where the river was especially narrow, we would tie up to the bank and give right-of-way to a convoy going down stream. ”

“ To the east and south of the Tiber, stretching far along the mountainous region and its western outskirts, was a race of hardy mountaineers, broken up, as hill peoples usually are, into a number of communities without any principle of cohesion except that of the various tribes to which they belonged. ”