THE BEAUTY OF WATER

Waipa Post, Volume 44, Issue 3195, 25 June 1932, Page 6

THE BEAUTY OF WATER

To know the pure beauty of water you must . come to Syrian desert springs. Alpine waters gush out from meadows of gentians and lilies; the Highland burns flail over granite boulders under birches and rowans with the hillside of bracken behind them; almost everywhere in the world the flowing of water has a landscape to enhance it as a jewel its setting. But in the desert—and the hills of Damascus are but desert up-tilted—-the water is lovely in itself alone, for there is nothing else beside it. It wells out cold and clear and still from the hot heart of the ground, and flows away silently over its stony bed where every limpid pebble shows. A few flags and willow shrubs line the deep-sunken channels; above these the hard desert earth, strewn with stones, comes up to the very lip on each side.

It is as if the pure freshness of Life made visible were bowing there; so silent in the strength that carries it up from the hidden centre that no whisper, only some over-all ripple of brightness as it moves in the sunlight, tells you that it travels. But the oasis is green to your sight in the distance. And in the long afternoon as it slopes towards evening you will see along the bare shoulders of the hills from their hollows of thin pasture the flocks of sheep come down behind their shepherds to the drinking place. The people of the East feel this symbolic beauty of water more than we do. They will sit happily to picnic by a dusty roadside, without even a tree to shade, with nothing except the small thread of some wayside stream which we call a ditch to mitigate the dreariness of the surrounding landscape; and if you ask they will tell you that they sit there "because the voice of the water is sweet." —Freya Stack in the Cornhill Magazine.