A GORGE.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLIX, Issue 21, 21 May 1913, Page 8

A GORGE.

Battle with Earth. (By EDEX PH ILLPOTTS, in tire ."Westminister Gazette.**) Reflect ion swiftly revealfi the significance of a river gorge, for it is upon L'U/ii a point that the i interest of early man is seen to centre. The shallow, too, attracts, him. though its value varies: it nniest ever be a doubtful thing, because •the toliadlow depends upon the moodts of a river, am] a ford i« not always fordable. But to lhe gorge no flood can reach. There the river's banks are highest, the aperture between them most trifling; there man from olden time has found the obvious pl a re of crossing and thrown his permanent bridge io span the waterway. At a gorge is the natural point for passage, anti Pontifex, tho bridge-builder, seeking that site, bends road io river where lin work may be moat easily performed, moat securely founded. But while the bridge, ita arch springing from the live rock, its safe enough, the water* beneath are like io be dangerous, and if a river is navigable at all. at her gorge*, where the restricted volume races and deepens, do the greatest dangers lie. In Italy this fart gave birth to a tutelary genius, or ehadowy eaint. win se special rare was the raft-men of Arno ami other river*. Their dangeroua biusineso took these foderatore amid strange hazards, and one may imagine them on semi-submerg-ed timbers, swirling and crashing over many a rocky rapid, in the throats of the hills, whore twilight homed and death was ever ready to snatch them from return to smooth water* and sunshine. So

a new guardian arose ' to meet these perils, and the boldest navigator lifted his thoughts to Heaven and commended his soul to the keeping of San Gorgone. Sublimity haunts these places; be they great as the Grand Canon of Arizona and the mountain rifts of Italy and France, or trifling os this dimple on Devon’s face of which I tell to-day, they reveal similar characteristics and awake like interest in the mind of the intelligent being who may enter them. 'Here, under the roof of Devon, through the measures that press up to the Dartmoor granite and are changed by the vanished heat thereof, a little Dartmoor stream, in her age-long battle with earth, has cut a right gorge, and so rendered herself immortal. There came a region in her downward progress when she found barriers of stone uplifted between her and her goal; whereupon, without avoiding the encounter, she cast herself boldly upon the work and set out to cleave and to carve. Now th*ic* glyptic business, begun long before the first palaeolithic man trod earth, is far advanced; the river has sunk a gully of near two hundred feet through the solid rock, and still pursues her way in the nether darkness, gnawing ceaselessly at the etone and leaving the marks of her earlier labours high up on either side of the present channel. There, written on the dark Devonian rock, is a record of erosion set down ages before human eye can have marked it; for fifty feet above the present bed are clean-scooped potholes, round and true, left by those prehensive waters. But the sides of the gorge are mostly broken and sloping; and upon the shelves of it dwell trees that fling their branches .together with amazing intricacies of foliage in summertime and lace-like ramage in winter Now bright sunshine flashes down the pillars of them and falls from ledge ■to ledge of each steep precipice; .it brightens great ivy banks and illuminates a thousand ferns, that spring and stud each little separate knoll in the great declivities, or 101 l from clefts and crannies .to break the purple shadows with their fronds. The buckler and the shield .fern leap spritely where there is most light; the polypody loves the limb of the oak; the hart’s tongue haunts the coolest, darkest crevices and hides the shy beauty of silvery mosses and filmy ferns under cover of each crinkled leaf. And secret waters twinkle out by many a hidden channel to them, bedewing their foliage with grey moisture. On a cloudy day night never departs from the deepest caverns of this gorge, ami only the foam light reveals each polished rib and buttress. The air is full of mist from a waterfall that thunders through the darkness, and chance of season and weather but seldom permit the westering sun to thrust a red-gold shaft into gloom. But that rare moment is worth pilgrimage, for then the place awakens and a thousand magic passes of brightness pierce the gorge to reveal its secrets. In such moments shall be seen the glittering concavities, the fair pillars and arches carved by the wafer, and the hidden forms of delicate life that thrive upon them, dwelling in darkness and drinking of the foam. Most notable is a crimson fungus that clings to the dripping precipices like a robe, so that they seem .made of polished bloodstone, and hint the horror of some recent and dreadful death in these loud shouting caves. Below, the mass of the river, ink-black under its creaming veil of foam, shouts and hagfeni, bove. there slope alone inwards the cliff-masses to a mere ribbon of golden green, high aloft where the trees twine their arms, yet admit rare flashes from the azure above them. Beech and ash spring horizontally from the precipices, and great must be the bedded strength of the roots that hold their trunks hanging there. With the dark forces of the gorge dragging them downward and the sunshine drawing them triumphantly up between gravitation ami light—they poise, sentieitt and struggling as it seems—destruction beneath the life Iteekoining from above. They flourish thus above their ultimate graves, since they, too, must fall at last and join those dead tree skeletons whose Istnes are glimmering amid the rocks below.

Hero light and darkness so cunningly blend that size is forgotten, as always liajqwns before a thing inherently fine. The small gorge wrought of a small river grows great and bulks large to imagination. The soaring sides of it, the shadowloving things beneath, the torture of tlx trees above, and the living river, busy as of yore in levelling its ancient bed to tho sen, waken wonder conquest over these fire baked rocks. The head goes out to

her and takes pleasn.e to follow her front the darkness of her battle into the ligM again, where, flower-crowned, she emerges between green banks that shelve gently, hung with wood-rush and meadow-sweet, sorrel and golden saxifrage. Here through a great canopy of translucent; foliage shines the noon sunlight, celebrating peace. Into the river, where she spreads upon a smooth pool, and trout dart shadowy through the crystal, and brightness burns, until the stream bed sparkles into amber and agate and flashes up in sweet reflections beneath' each brier and arched fern-frond bending at the brink. One chronicles, then, this slight scrateK on the faec of the earth as a good and finished thing; one experiences within it just that emotion rightly to be demanded of any gorge. Nor does the rivulet lack correspondence with greater streams in its human relation; she id complete in every particular, for mail has found her also: ami dimly seen, amid the very tree tops, where the gorge opens to light, and great rocks come kissing close, an arch of stone carries his littla road from hamlet to hamlet.