Vardar River

“ Threshing up against the current, the gunboats and stern-wheelers one after another entered the gorge. The Nile, which below is nearly a mile across, narrows to a bare 200 yards. The pace of the stream becomes more swift. Great swirls and eddies disturb its surface. High on either side rise black, broken, and precipitous cliffs, looking like piles of gigantic stones. Through and among them the flood-river pours with a loud roaring, breaking into foam and rapids wherever the submerged rocks are near the surface. Between the barren heights and the water is a strip of green bushes and grass. ”

“ After a day’s journey through these primeval scenes, we reached the banks of the river Arcs-a-plats, where innumerable torrents rush headlong, with a thousand mazes from the mountain’s {139} brow, and in their union form this noble river. From afar is heard the deafening and continuous sound of its own dashes, as it traverses a rocky bed with extraordinary rapidity. We crossed the river in order to attempt the passage of another defile, still more wonderful, where the waters of the Vermillion have forced an opening. ”

“ Miserable as the general aspect of this portion of the Nile Valley is, there is worse to come. At 718 miles from Lake Victoria the Bahr-el-Zaraf, or Giraffe River, branches off from the main stream through the swamps to the east, and the Bahr-el-Gebel enters that dreadful tract known as the 'sudd' country. The word 'sudd' in the Arabic language means a barrier, and this name is now applied to the entire area in which the river is liable to be blocked by the water-weeds which break into its channel from the illimitable marshes through which it strives to force a tortuous passage. ”

“ Rolf hailed Tristan to the prow, and pointed with knotted finger to the shore.
“The Land of the Seven Streams, sir,” he said to him. “I know these cliffs of old. See yonder valley; the Silver Snake runs therein, a great river and a strong. The stars have steered us well. Hold for the opening in the cliffs; we can ride in over the bar.”
Running fast on the backs of the billows, they came to where a counter current beat upon the prow, fretting the sea into contending streams. It was where the river charged the tide. The galley swerved and faltered ”

“ The narrow and choked Bahr Giraffe has disappeared; instead of which a river of a hundred yards' width of clear running water meets us at the junction of our cutting. As far as the eye can reach to the E.S.E., there is a succession of large open sheets of water where a few days ago we saw nothing but a boundless plain of marsh grass, without one drop of water visible. These sheets of water mark the course of a river, but each lake is separated by a dam of floating vegetation. The volume of water is very important, and a stream is running at the rate of three miles an hour. ”

“ Indeed the Bareda is a small stream. It would with us be called a good mill stream. We would rather term it a creek than a river. It is mostly confined in a channel of eight or ten yards wide, and then may be waded without coming above the knee. Much of the water of these rivers is exhausted in irrigation. They flow east, and after rendering a noble plain very fertile and productive for twenty or thirty miles, form a lake or marsh—they have no outlet. I wished much to ride eastward through this plain and see the country about the lake, but the time of the year and other causes prevented. ”

“ The Var is not a very formidable-looking river at first glance, and has not the tempestuous flood of the Rhône and the Durance in actual volume, but the excess of water which it carries to the sea, at certain seasons, is proportionately very much greater. The Rhône increases its bulk but thirty times, the Durance a hundred times, but the Var throws into the Mediterranean, in time of flood, a hundred and forty times its usual flow, a fact which ranks it as one of the most fickle waterways of Europe, if not of the world. ”

“ September 6.—The ana-branch camped on last night being found to run parallel to the course of the river, received the name of Parallel Creek. Its average width is about 150 yards, well watered, and full of melaleucas and fallen timber. The country on its north bank down to its junction with the river 20 miles from the junction of Warroul Creek, is broken into ridges of quartz and sand-stone, stony, and poorly grassed. ”

“ The course of the river, as far as seen in this valley, is nearly south; the bottom and banks generally of gravel; the face of the country a dry, barren, undulating plain. [168] Our course, after leaving the river, was north-west by north. About two o'clock, we struck Ham's Fork, a tributary of Green River, and encamped near the water-side. [169] This stream probably pours down immense bodies of water when the snow melts upon the neighbouring highlands; for its channel, at the place where we struck it, was half a mile in width, and two hundred feet deep. ”

“ The No. 10 steamer arrived in the evening. The river is wider than when we last saw it, but is much obstructed by small islands, formed of rafts of vegetation that have grounded in their descent. I fear we may find the river choked in many places below stream. No dependence can ever be placed upon this accursed river. The fabulous Styx must be a sweet rippling brook, compared to this horrible creation. A violent wind acting upon the high waving plain of sugar-cane grass may suddenly create a change ”

“ As Jefferson Worth and his companions stood now on the bank of the river they saw the waste-way from the turbine wheel that ran the generators nearly thirty feet above the bottom of the channel. The flood that had cut the deep canyons through the heart of the Basin, destroying Kingston on its course, had worked on a smaller scale in the old Dry River wash, cutting a narrow gorge nearly fifty feet deep from its outlet at the new sea past the power plant at Barba and nearly to the spillway of the main canal. ”

“ The rapids thus formed are also ephemeral, for as the gradient of the tributaries is lowered the main stream becomes able to handle the smaller and finer load which they discharge.
A rare class of falls is produced where the minor tributaries of a young river are not able to keep pace with their master stream in the erosion of their beds because of their smaller volume, and thus join it by plunging over the side of its gorge. But as the river approaches grade and slackens its down cutting, the tributaries sooner or later overtake it, and effacing their falls, unite with it on a level. ”

“ December 20.—The river was still followed down to-day, the party keeping about four miles from it, to avoid its scrubs and ana-branches. At between 7 or 8 miles, a stream about 100 yards wide, coming from the eastward, caused them to halt until a road was cut through the thick vine scrub that fringed its banks. Four miles further on they camped at a small lagoon close to the bank of the river, at which point it is about 100 yards wide, deep, and too salt for drinking, being affected by the tide. The country travelled over was box, and tea-tree, melon-hole flats, shewing very high flood marks. ”

“ But these fellows are in no fear of the rocks below; they easily guide their barks out of the rushing floods, through the whirlpools and eddies, into the slack shore-water in the rear of the boat, and stand up like men and demand backsheesh. These logs are popular ferry-boats in the Upper Nile; I have seen a woman crossing the river on one, her clothes in a basket and the basket on her head—and the Nile is nowhere an easy stream to swim.
Far ahead of us the cataract people are seen in lines and groups, half-hidden by the rocks, pulling and stumbling along ”

“ From a high ridge which falls away abruptly into a water-hewn declivity, we look through broad, open vistas far below at the North Fork of the Flathead River. The stream takes its way between banks of fine gray pebbles, parting now over a sandy bar in slender green ribbons, then uniting in one broad current, again separating to curl in white foam-frills around a boulder or303 little island. Mild and limpid as the river now appears there is evidence of its flood-tide fury in uprooted trees and livid scars along its banks. ”

“ This was in August, and yet at one place we traveled over a snow bank which we estimated was 25 feet deep. After arriving there in company with one or two others, I selected a claim on the middle fork of Feather River, a short distance below the mouth of Nelson’s Creek, where the stream could be turned by a dam. We thought there was a possibility that the river bed might be rich, and we concluded to construct a small wing dam sufficient to test it. We put in the dam so as to throw the water from a small portion of the river’s bed. The claim proved as worthless as our first one. ”

“ The swamps are still well above the summer level of the river, and the loss of volume is not great. At Bor, however, the real difficulties begin, and the ‘shorn and parcelled river strains’ miserably along for some 350 miles through the real sudd country. The river that leaves Lado in April or March with a volume of 600 cubic metres per second is reduced to less than half this amount by the time it emerges from the maze on the further side, and that, too, although it has nominally received at Lake No through the Bahr el Ghazal the drainage of a vast province. ”

“ Nevertheless, although in open water, we now find ourselves prisoners in a species of lake, as we are completely shut in by a serious dam of dense rafts of vegetation that have been borne forward and tightly compressed by the great force of this new river. It is simply ridiculous to suppose that this river can ever be rendered navigable. One or two vessels, if alone, would be utterly helpless, and might be entirely destroyed with their crews by a sudden change that would break up the country and inclose them in a trap from which they could never escape. ”

“ That on the eastern side of the Kunar River, from the river bank up to the crest of the main range which forms the watershed between the Kunar River and the country (lit. direction) of Barawal and Bajaur, this frontier follows the southern watershed of the Arnawai stream, which falls into the Kunar River close to the village of Arnawai, leaving to Chitrar all the country of which the drainage falls into the Kunar River, by means of this stream, while the southern drainage of this last-mentioned watershed, which does not fall into the Arnawai stream, pertains to Afghanistan. ”

“ In the north, on the edge of the tableland, they are most numerous. On the east coast, at the head of the Burdekin River, there are unmistakeable signs of an upward effort of the imprisoned waters to free themselves. One main tributary, a creek called Fletcher's Creek, takes its rise in a labyrinth of basaltic rocks, that for years defied the efforts of the whites to penetrate. ”

“ The river bed, now absolutely dry, evidently carried into the desert during the torrential rain all the drainage of the mountainous country we had traversed, practically that from Abid, the Leker Mountains, and the combined flow of the Lawah plain from the mountains to the west of it, to which, of course, may be added the western watershed of the Darband Mountain itself. ”

“ At the bottoms of steep slopes, temporary streams build alluvial cones or fans. Along its flood-plain portion, a stream deposits more or less sediment on its flats. The part played by deposition in building a river flat has already been alluded to. A depositing stream often wanders about in an apparently aimless way across its flood plain. At the bends in its course, cutting is often taking place on the outside of a curve while deposition is going on in the inside. The valley of the Baraboo illustrates this process of cutting and building. ”

“ Two hours from Faccardine's grove brought us to the fifth caphar, and another little hour to the river Damer or Tamyras, the former being its modern, the latter its ancient name. It is a river apt to swell much upon sudden rains; in which case, precipitating itself from the mountains with great rapidity, it has been fatal to many passengers. ”

“ It is very thickly wooded below the first rapids; above these the trees disappear, and the river is bordered by immense plains, which would afford pasturage to large numbers of cattle. Barra is supplied with beef from the Rio Branco, where it must cost very little, as it is sold in Barra at five cents the pound.
Strong northeasterly winds make the ascent of the river tedious. A boat will come down from San Joachim, near the sources of the river, to Barra, a distance of five hundred miles, and passing many rapids, in twelve days. ”

“ We stop to land a passenger at the mouth of the Von River, which comes tearing down through the gorges, bringing with it tons upon tons of gravel and shingle, which in its shifting course, terraces the plain, and carries ruin and desolation in its path. During the last few years the stream has shifted its bed fully a mile, and in its migration it has cut away one of the finest orchards that was in all the lake district. ”

“ From Marwar Junction to Jodhpur, the train leaves the Aravalis and goes northwards into the region of death that lies beyond the Luni River. Sand, ak bushes, and sand-hills, varied with occasional patches of unthrifty cultivation, make up the scenery. Rain has been very scarce in Marwar this year, and the country, consequently, shows at its worst, for almost every square mile of a kingdom nearly as large as Scotland is dependent on the sky for its crops. In a good season, a large village can pay from seven to nine thousand rupees revenue without blenching. ”