At eight we landed again, and travelled by a stage-coach for four hours through a pleasant and well-cultivated country, perfectly French in every respect: in the appearance of the cottages; the air, language, and dress of the peasantry; the signboards on the shops and taverns; and the Virgin’s shrines, and crosses, by the wayside. Nearly every common labourer and boy, though he had no shoes to his feet, wore round his waist a sash of some bright colour: generally red: and the women, who were working in the fields and gardens, and doing all kinds of husbandry, wore, one and all, great flat straw hats with most capacious brims. There were Catholic Priests and Sisters of Charity in the village streets; and images of the Saviour at the corners of cross-roads, and in other public places.
At noon we went on board another steamboat, and reached the village of Lachine, nine miles from Montreal, by three o’clock. There we left the river, and went on by land.
Montreal is pleasantly situated on the margin of the St. Lawrence, and is backed by some bold heights, about which there are charming rides and drives. The streets are generally narrow and irregular, as in most French towns of any age; but in the more modern parts of the city, they are wide and airy. They display a great variety of very good shops; and both in the town and suburbs there are many excellent private dwellings. The granite quays are remarkable for their beauty, solidity and extent.
There is a very large Catholic cathedral here, recently erected; with two tall spires, of which one is yet unfinished. In the open space in front of this edifice, stands a solitary, grim-looking, square brick tower, which has a quaint and remarkable appearance, and which the wiseacres of the place have consequently determined to pull down immediately. The Government House is very superior to that at Kingston, and the town is full of life and bustle. In one of the suburbs is a plank road--not foot-path--five or six miles long, and a famous road it is, too. All the rides in the vicinity were made doubly interesting by the bursting out of spring, which is here so rapid, that it is but a day’s leap from barren winter, to the blooming youth of summer.
The steamboats to Quebec perform the journey in the night; that is to say, they leave Montreal at six in the evening, and arrive in Quebec at six next morning. We made this excursion during our stay in Montreal (which exceeded a fortnight), and were charmed by its interest and beauty.
The impression made upon the visitor by this Gibraltar of America: its giddy heights; its citadel suspended, as it were, in the air; its picturesque steep streets and frowning gateways; and the splendid views which burst upon the eye at every turn: is at once unique and lasting. It is a place not to be forgotten or mixed up in the mind with other places, or altered for a moment in the crowd of scenes a traveller can recall. Apart from the realities of this most picturesque city, there are associations clustering about it which would make a desert rich in interest. The dangerous precipice along whose rocky front Wolfe and his brave companions climbed to glory; the Plains of Abraham, where he received his mortal wound; the fortress, so chivalrously defended by Montcalm; and his soldier’s grave, dug for him while yet alive, by the bursting of a shell; are not the least among them, or among the gallant incidents of history. That is a noble Monument, too, and worthy of two great nations, which perpetuates the memory of both brave generals, and on which their names are jointly written.
The city is rich in public institutions and in Catholic churches and charities, but it is mainly in the prospect from the site of the Old Government House, and from the Citadel, that its surpassing beauty lies. The exquisite expanse of country, rich in field and forest, mountain-height and water, which lies stretched out before the view, with miles of Canadian villages, glancing in long white streaks, like veins along the landscape; the motley crowd of gables, roofs, and chimney-tops in the old hilly town immediately at hand; the beautiful St. Lawrence sparkling and flashing in the sunlight; and the tiny ships below the rock from which you gaze, whose distant rigging looks like spiders’ webs against the light, while casks and barrels on their decks dwindle into toys, and busy mariners become so many puppets: all this, framed by a sunken window in the fortress and looked at from the shadowed room within, forms one of the brightest and the most enchanting pictures that the eye can rest upon.
In the spring of the year, vast numbers of emigrants who have newly arrived from England or from Ireland, pass between Quebec and Montreal on their way to the backwoods and new settlements of Canada. If it be an entertaining lounge (as I very often found it) to take a morning stroll upon the quay at Montreal, and see them grouped in hundreds on the public wharfs about their chests and boxes, it is matter of deep interest to be their fellow-passenger on one of these steamboats, and, mingling with the concourse, see and hear them unobserved.
THE TIGRIS
GEORGE RAWLINSON
The Tigris, like the Euphrates, rises from two principal sources. The most distant, and therefore the true source is the western one, which is in latitude 38° 10′ longitude, 39° 20′, nearly, a little to the south of the high mountain lake called Göljik, in the peninsula formed by the Euphrates where it sweeps round between Palon and Telek. The Tigris’s source is near the south-western angle of the lake, and cannot be more than two or three miles from the channel of the Euphrates. The course of the Tigris is at first somewhat north of east, but after pursuing this direction for about twenty-five miles it makes a sweep round to the south, and descends by Arghani Maden upon Diarbekr. Here is a river of considerable size, and it is crossed by a bridge of ten arches a little below that city. It then turns suddenly to the east, and flows in this direction past Osman Kieui to Til where it once more alters its course and takes that south-easterly direction, which it pursues with certain slight variations, to its final junctions with the Euphrates. At Osman Kieui it receives the second or Eastern Tigris, which descends from Niphates, with a due course south, and, collecting on its way the waters of a large number of streams, unites with the Tigris half-way between Diarbekr and Til, in longitude 41° nearly. Near Til a large stream flows into it from the north-east, bringing almost as much water as the main channel ordinarily holds. The length of the whole stream, exclusive of meanders, is reckoned at 1,146 miles. From Diarbekr to Samara the navigation is much impeded by rapids, rocks and shallows, as well as by artificial bunds or dams, which in ancient times were thrown across the stream, probably for purposes of irrigation. The average width of the Tigris in this part of its course is 200 yards, while its depth is very considerable. From the west the Tigris obtains no tributary of the slightest importance, for the Tharthar, which is said to have once reached it, now ends in a salt lake, a little below Tekrit. Its volume, however, is continually increasing as it descends, in consequence of the great bulk of water brought in from the east, particularly by the Great Zab and the Diyaleh.
The Tigris, like the Euphrates, has a flood season. Early in the month of March, in consequence of the melting of the snow on the southern flank of Niphates, the river rises rapidly. Its breadth gradually increases at Diarbekr from 100 or 120 to 250 yards. The stream is swift and turbid. The rise continues through March and April, reaching its full height generally in the first or second week of May. At this time the country about Baghdad is often extensively flooded, not, however, so much from the Tigris as from the overflow of the Euphrates, which is here poured into the eastern stream through a canal. About the middle of May the Tigris begins to fall, and by midsummer it has reached its normal level.
We find but little mention of the Tigris in Scripture. It appears indeed under the name of Hiddekel, among the rivers of Eden, and is there correctly described as “running eastward to Assyria.” But after this we hear no more of it, if we except one doubtful allusion in Nahum, until the Captivity, when it becomes well known to the prophet Daniel, who had to cross it in his journeys to and from Susa. With Daniel it is “the Great River”--an expression commonly applied to the Euphrates; and by its side he sees some of his most important visions. No other mention seems to occur except in the apocryphal books; and there it is unconnected with any real history. The Tigris, in its upper course, anciently ran through Armenia and Assyria. Lower down, from above the point where it enters on the alluvial plain, it separated Babylonia from Susiana. In the wars between the Romans and the Parthians we find it constituting, for a short time (from A. D. 114 to A. D. 117), the boundary line between these two empires. Otherwise it has scarcely been of any political importance. The great chain of Zagros is the main natural boundary between Western and Central Asia; and beyond this, the next defensible line is the Euphrates. Historically it is found that either the central power pushes itself westward to that river; or the power ruling the west advances eastward to the mountain barrier.