“The Heart of the Andes”/Part 10

Divine repose was expressed by the Dome; manly energy by the Cordillera. And now we welcome a graceful feminine element. Water is the fair stranger we are now to greet. We have been all the while aware of her brilliant presence; and have not rarely wandered away from the rough hills to be refreshed by rainbow showers, and stirred with a sense of dancing motion. Now we may give ourselves fully to the river’s bright influence. Forth from a sunlit spot it comes, as unexpected as if we had not seen its placid delay above, where its pool attracted and fixed the village. It comes with snow memories in the foam of its rock-shattered flow. It curves with deep, clear fulness into an upper rocky basin. It gushes so firm and urgent against its walls that its reflected edges are seen to be heaped higher than the unchecked slide of its mid-current. One inch more in its angle of descent would send that whole smooth clearness flying into foam. But its strong speed does not spoil its mirror-like quietness. It moves steadily on to its beautiful duty, and then suddenly — “the wild cataract leaps in glory.”

The river is transfigured before us. Motion flings itself out into light. Green water snows down in a glimmering belt of white. Every drop dashes away from every other drop. Each one has its own sunbeam. Diamond flashes join into jewelled wreaths. Pearl and opal blend their soft tremors. Sapphire and beryl mingle with the strong glow of amber. And the wreaths intertwine and float together, until the mid-whirl is a gemmy turbulence, a crush of foam and spray, and rays and rainbows.

There is no sharp line to mark where calm sliding water is instantly transmuted into wild falling water. The fall becomes a fall without any harsh edge of precipice. We cannot define where the shadowy gleam above bends fleeter over the first ledges; nor where the bend first breaks with spray, and spray thickens, and the curve passes into a leap, and the leap into a resistless plunge, and all the bends, curves, leaps, and plunges fling themselves together in joyful abandonment, thrilled through and through with sensitive tremors of graceful daring.

As the cataract comes gushing forward rather than dropped in precipitous downfall, so it is not received on a flattened level of water below. Rocks break its plunge, and give it pause. And then this shape of beauty, disarrayed, but fairer thus, springs, not frantic or sullen, into a gloomy chasm, but sweeps, a mist of sunshine, down behind an iridescent veil, upon the white splendors of its own image. It eddies with lambent lights along the warm cliffs, and then glides down the steps and rapids of a new career — on to join the Amazon.

Serene sunshine fills the right of the gulf. On the left, where spray keeps the mosses of the cliff long and rich, is a flow of softened prismatic color, and the angle is filled with opalescent reflected lights from the sunny cataract. This is one of the most enchanting effects in the picture.

The gleam of the Cataract recalls the snows of the Dome. The bending plunge of the one repeats the slow curves of the other. Across leagues of full distance, the light of the fall, secluded and subordinate, answers, like an echo, to the great dominant light. And observe also in the division of the cataract by its bold cliff, and in its parted cascade falling in dimness on the right, a reminiscence of the Cordillera, and the dependent misty light at its summit. Such continuous effects sustain the dramatic unity of the picture, and show that one creative thought reigns everywhere. Observe again how the level of the basin below the cataract corresponds with the emphatic plateau below the mountains, — repose after power. No discomposure or weariness is anywhere possible. We are nowhere beaten back and debilitated by stern, rude heights we cannot climb. Slope and plateau and successive grades of ascent take us gently up from the lowest plane of blue water speeding toward ocean, to blue, illimitable space of sky. Step by step the eye is educated to comprehend the vast scope of the scene, yet no step is abrupt. There is always some spot where the precipice breaks off into ledges, and where steeps pass into declivities.

Before he comes to the complex beauty of the foreground, let the student make one more excursion over the large undulations and among the shady coverts of the central forest, — the Montaña of the Andes. Glows of approaching evening lie among the long shadows and fall across the glades. Not even where the dusky canopy of clouds shuts off sunshine can this become an austere woodland. Trees of many-colored foliage make play of light even in the unillumined spots; and sunshine, streaming low and level, betrays a wilderness of leafage and umbrage, stems and vines.

From these bright labyrinths we emerge again into open daylight. Here, above the basin, warm cliffs uphold a tablet where sunlight may blazon its last fond inscriptions. Other hieroglyphs are already there, — the story of the rock’s own life told in crevice, ledge, and mossy cleft, and the myriad traces of Time, the destroyer and renewer. As air above, so water below has pencilled its legend. Lapping ripples have marked levels of drought and freshet along its base. And the cliffs, doing their part in this interchange of bland influences, send down their image to hang without heaviness in the shimmering water. The still water reflects, as perfectly as the arrowy, shattered water contained, light. How full of mild splendor is this pool of Nepenthe! Into its amphitheatre the river leaps exulting. A maze of woven sunbeams floats above her bold repetition of feats done in her youth among argent snows. She springs out upon her own image, which falls before her, a column of white lustre lengthening over the undulations, only to break in the swift silvery bends of the lower rapid. And above this wavering image Iris floats within her veil of mist, and her bright hues shine through it. The cataract sheds prismatic tints upon the unsunlit cliffs, and the cliffs that are in sunlight shed radiance upon the air. The void is flooded with a glow of reflected lights. All about, trees stoop over the brink and tassel the precipices with tendrils and pendent branches. Delicious spot, which he who will can dream full of the music of falling water, as he sees it brimming with effulgence. It lies open before us, a lucent shell lined with imprisoned rainbows, — a chalice of dissolved pearl, — a flushed corolla, where the cataract rises like a white cone of vestal leaves just opening, — a pool of newly-troubled water, where weary spirits may find healing and lightness of heart.