Niagra
Falls by Rupert Brooks
Samuel Butler has a lot to
answer for. But for him, a modern traveller could spend his time peacefully
admiring the scenery instead of feeling himself bound to dog the simple and
grotesque of the world for the sake of their too-human comments. It is his
fault if a peasant’s naivete has come to outweigh the beauty
of rivers, and the remarks of clergymen are more than mountains. It is very
restful to give up all effort at observing human nature and drawing social and
political deductions from trifles, and to let oneself relapse into wide-mouthed
worship of the wonders of nature. And this is very easy at Niagara. Niagara
means nothing. It is not leading anywhere. It does not result from anything. It
throws no light on the effects of Protection, nor on the Facility for Divorce
in America, nor on Corruption in Public Life, nor on Canadian character, nor
even on the Navy Bill. It is merely a great deal of water falling over some
cliffs. But it is very remarkably that. The human race, apt as a child to
destroy what it admires, has done its best to surround the Falls with every
distraction, incongruity, and vulgarity. Hotels, power-houses, bridges, trams,
picture post-cards, sham legends, stalls, booths, rifle-galleries, and
side-shows frame them about. And there are Touts. Niagara is the central home
and breeding- place for all the touts of earth. There are touts insinuating,
and touts raucous, greasy touts, brazen touts, and upper-class, refined,
gentlemanly, take-you-by-the-arm touts; touts who intimidate and touts who
wheedle; professionals, amateurs, and dilettanti, male and female;
touts who would photograph you with your arm round a young lady against a faked
background of the sublimest cataract, touts who would bully you into cars,
char-a-bancs, elevators, or tunnels, or deceive you into a carriage and pair,
touts who would sell you picture postcards, moccasins, sham Indian beadwork,
blankets, tee-pees, and crockery; and touts, finally, who have no apparent
object in the world, but just purely, simply, merely, incessantly,
indefatigably, and ineffugibly–to tout. And in the midst of all this,
overwhelming it all, are the Falls. He who sees them instantly forgets
humanity. They are not very high, but they are overpowering. They are divided
by an island into two parts, the Canadian and the American.
Half a mile or so above the
Falls, on either side, the water of the great stream begins to run more swiftly
and in confusion. It descends with ever-growing speed. It begins chattering and
leaping, breaking into a thousand ripples, throwing up joyful fingers of spray.
Sometimes it is divided by islands and rocks, sometimes the eye can see nothing
but a waste of laughing, springing, foamy waves, turning, crossing, even
seeming to stand for an instant erect, but always borne impetuously forward
like a crowd of triumphant feasters. Sit close down by it, and you see a
fragment of the torrent against the sky, mottled, steely, and foaming, leaping
onward in far-flung criss-cross strands of water. Perpetually the eye is on the
point of descrying a pattern in this weaving, and perpetually it is cheated by
change. In one place part of the flood plunges over a ledge a few feet high and
a quarter of a mile or so long, in a uniform and stable curve. It gives an
impression of almost military concerted movement, grown suddenly out of
confusion. But it is swiftly lost again in the multitudinous tossing merriment.
Here and there a rock close to the surface is marked by a white wave that faces
backwards and seems to be rushing madly up-stream, but is really stationary in
the headlong charge. But for these signs of reluctance, the waters seem to
fling themselves on with some foreknowledge of their fate, in an ever wilder
frenzy. But it is no Maeterlinckian prescience. They prove, rather, that Greek
belief that the great crashes are preceded by a louder merriment and a wilder
gaiety. Leaping in the sunlight, careless, entwining, clamorously joyful, the
waves riot on towards the verge.
But there they change. As
they turn to the sheer descent, the white and blue and slate-colour, in the
heart of the Canadian Falls at least, blend and deepen to a rich, wonderful,
luminous green. On the edge of disaster the river seems to gather herself, to
pause, to lift a head noble in ruin, and then, with a slow grandeur, to plunge
into the eternal thunder and white chaos below. Where the stream runs shallower
it is a kind of violet colour, but both violet and green fray and frill to
white as they fall. The mass of water, striking some ever-hidden base of rock,
leaps up the whole two hundred feet again in pinnacles and domes of spray. The
spray falls back into the lower river once more; all but a little that fines to
foam and white mist, which drifts in layers along the air, graining it, and
wanders out on the wind over the trees and gardens and houses, and so vanishes.
The manager of one of the
great power-stations on the banks of the river above the Falls told me that the
centre of the riverbed at the Canadian Falls is deep and of a saucer shape. So
it may be possible to fill this up to a uniform depth, and divert a lot of
water for the power-houses. And this, he said, would supply the need for more
power, which will certainly soon arise, without taking away from the beauty of
Niagara. This is a handsome concession of the utilitarians to ordinary sight-
seers. Yet, I doubt if we shall be satisfied. The real secret of the beauty and
terror of the Falls is not their height or width, but the feeling of colossal
power and of unintelligible disaster caused by the plunge of that vast body of
water. If that were taken away, there would be little visible change; but the
heart would be gone.
The American Falls do not
inspire this feeling in the same way as the Canadian. It is because they are
less in volume, and because the water does not fall so much into one place. By
comparison their beauty is almost delicate and fragile. They are
extraordinarily level, one long curtain of lacework and woven foam. Seen from
opposite, when the sun is on them, they are blindingly white, and the clouds of
spray show dark against them. With both Falls the colour of the water is the
ever- altering wonder. Greens and blues, purples and whites, melt into one
another, fade, and come again, and change with the changing sun. Sometimes they
are as richly diaphanous as a precious stone, and glow from within with a deep,
inexplicable light. Sometimes the white intricacies of dropping foam become opaque
and creamy. And always there are the rainbows. If you come suddenly upon the
Falls from above, a great double rainbow, very vivid, spanning the extent of
spray from top to bottom, is the first thing you see. If you wander along the
cliff opposite, a bow springs into being in the American Falls, accompanies you
courteously on your walk, dwindles and dies as the mist ends, and awakens again
as you reach the Canadian tumult. And the bold traveller who attempts the trip
under the American Falls sees, when he dare open his eyes to anything, tiny
baby rainbows, some four or five yards in span, leaping from rock to rock among
the foam, and gambolling beside him, barely out of hand’s reach, as he goes.
One I saw in that place was a complete circle, such as I have never seen
before, and so near that I could put my foot on it. It is a terrifying journey,
beneath and behind the Falls. The senses are battered and bewildered by the
thunder of the water and the assault of wind and spray; or rather, the sound is
not of falling water, but merely of falling; a noise of unspecified ruin. So,
if you are close behind the endless clamour, the sight cannot recognise liquid
in the masses that hurl past. You are dimly and pitifully aware that sheets of
light and darkness are falling in great curves in front of you. Dull
omnipresent foam washes the face. Farther away, in the roar and hissing, clouds
of spray seem literally to slide down some invisible plane of air.
Beyond the foot of the
Falls the river is like a slipping floor of marble, green with veins of dirty
white, made by the scum that was foam. It slides very quietly and slowly down
for a mile or two, sullenly exhausted. Then it turns to a dull sage green, and
hurries more swiftly, smooth and ominous. As the walls of the ravine close in,
trouble stirs, and the waters boil and eddy. These are the lower rapids, a
sight more terrifying than the Falls, because less intelligible. Close in its
bands of rock the river surges tumultuously forward, writhing and leaping as if
inspired by a demon. It is pressed by the straits into a visibly convex form.
Great planes of water slide past. Sometimes it is thrown up into a pinnacle of
foam higher than a house, or leaps with incredible speed from the crest of one
vast wave to another, along the shining curve between, like the spring of a
wild beast. Its motion continually suggests muscular action. The power manifest
in these rapids moves one with a different sense of awe and terror from that of
the Falls. Here the inhuman life and strength are spontaneous, active, almost
resolute; masculine vigour compared with the passive gigantic power, female,
helpless and overwhelming, of the Falls. A place of fear.
One is drawn back,
strangely, to a contemplation of the Falls, at every hour, and especially by
night, when the cloud of spray becomes an immense visible ghost, straining and
wavering high above the river, white and pathetic and translucent. The
Victorian lies very close below the surface in every man. There one can sit and
let great cloudy thoughts of destiny and the passage of empires drift through
the mind; for such dreams are at home by Niagara. I could not get out of my
mind the thought of a friend, who said that the rainbows over the Falls were
like the arts and beauty and goodness, with regard to the stream of life–caused
by it, thrown upon its spray, but unable to stay or direct or affect it, and
ceasing when it ceased. In all comparisons that rise in the heart, the river,
with its multitudinous waves and its single current, likens itself to a life,
whether of an individual or of a community. A man’s life is of many flashing
moments, and yet one stream; a nation’s flows through all its citizens, and yet
is more than they. In such places, one is aware, with an almost insupportable
and yet comforting certitude, that both men and nations are hurried onwards to
their ruin or ending as inevitably as this dark flood. Some go down to it
unreluctant, and meet it, like the river, not without nobility. And as
incessant, as inevitable, and as unavailing as the spray that hangs over the
Falls, is the white cloud of human crying…. With some such thoughts does the
platitudinous heart win from the confusion and thunder of Niagara a peace that
the quietest plains or most stable hills can never give.
ANSWER THE FOLLOWING
1. Why does the report begin with the man-made distractions
around the Niagra Falls?
2. How do they compare to the beauty of the falls? What does
this mean when one compares man-made distractions with nature?
3. How is this essay different from your understanding of
the report?
4. What made this essay entertaining?
5. What can you say about the description of Niagra Falls?
6. What do you think of conclusion? How is it different from
what you thought it would be?
7. Would you say that reading is better than looking at a
photograph of the Niagra falls? Why or Why not?
8. What are the insights of the report regarding the Niagra
falls and Human Frailties?
9. Have you ever felt the same way when contemplating
nature? What natural place lends itself to contemplation and peace?
10. In the modern world, it still
important to report and contemplate on nature? Is it less important now, or it is more important? Why?
I.
Write
an informal report about any beautiful places in the Philippines.
II.
Decide
on natural places (5 places) that you want to report on. Bring a notebook and
some writing materials to the place you decided to report on.
Take down notes about
everything around you, organizing them according to your senses.
The first row was filled in with sample
notes from other observing the Sunken Garden at the University of the Philippines.
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WHAT YOU SEE
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WHAT YOU HEAR
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WHAT YOU SMELL
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WHAT YOU TASTE
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WHAT YOU FEEL
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Tall
trees; little round leaves
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Students
chattering; jeepne
ys
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Wet
earth
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Turon; sweet taste
of banana crunchiness of the lumpia wrapper, juiciness in the mouth
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The
breeze riffling through my hair
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