Mimpish Monday: The Jardin at Clear Lake
Aug. 1st, 2016 08:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lblanchardFor today's Mimpish Monday, we find Reginald Farrer close to the end of his expedition to Kansu and Tibet in 1914-15.
THE RAINBOW BRIDGE
The Hastened End, pp. 274-276
Down the depths of the Dene we rode, and up the shingled miles of the confluent river, meeting, in the alder-coppice of the boulder-bed, with the abandoned antlers of an elk, left there till its lucky murderer should have time to come and reclaim them. Then up the mountain-side we still rode, and up to the Ma-chang, and up and up and up into the Alp, and over its bays and folds, till we actually attained on horseback to the mountain of black blocks above the Clear Lake.
It is a curious place, so loose a compilation of somber vast rocks that the turf between is springy with unfilled holes beneath, and there are deep caverns and hollows everywhere among the boulders, and water trickling and lurking, as if the whole hill were a sponge. As it indeed is, a slack-woven texture, full of pores and passages, lightly accumulated, and never settled down into solidity. Here we encamped; Bill in one tent, and I in another, and the staff in the big white one, lent us by the Viceroy of the Koko-Nor.
Close below lies the Clear Lake, down a steep climb among the dips and dells of the boulder-mountain. But at its head there intervenes the Jardin of which I spoke, a smooth delta of becks and rills converging to the Lake. And, as I now patrolled it gently, while the tents were being established, i realized with a certain sardonic amusement that all my other expeditions in the Da-Tung Alps had been wasted. For here, in this stretch of a quarter of a mile across and a hundred yards deep, occurred every high Alpine flower that I had found in the whole course of the season's arduous and unrewarding expeditions with the solitary exception of Primula urticifolia, immovably calcicole. It was a bewilderingly enrapturing place, with its paradoxical population, seeded down from the heights or translated by the becks. All the Poppies were there, all the Primulas, and many another adminicle of delight. And they all looked like guests and aliens, gathered together in one space by Nature's special invitation. I benignly revelled among the seeds, now ripe for the gathering, even to the prevalent Alpine Saxifrage of these ranges a feathery spire of white stars, rising from a rosette of very handsome glossy primuloid foliage : and each star with a pompous fat eye of black-purple, from the conspicuous swollen carpels. I suspect this of being S. egregia ; anyhow it abounds all over the high lawns of the Da-Tung, and descends to the foot of the Pass. But why pause on one pleasure, when there were so many more ? I was soon as fat as Humpty Dumpty, with swollen seed-packets bulging me out in every direction. Indeed, that Jardin at the head of the Clear Lake is perhaps the most entrancing collecting ground I have ever struck ; it was not with the altitude alone that my heart went boppoty-bop as I perused its gentle swards and shingle-flats.
That over-tried organ suffered greatly indeed, and did the oddest things. Wakeful through the nights I lay, with its rumblings and bumblings and stoppages ; it seemed to me to make such a noise that often I wondered if it was not avalanches in the silence of the lonely Alpine dark ; but heart-anguishes, hunger and weakness were all obliterated by the deifying glory of that place. Even in the doorway of my tent I was so happy that I could hardly breathe. All around me that tumble of mountainous dark conglomerate boulders, big as houses, with Isopyrum flopping purple in their crevices ; and down between them deep mossy caverns, or elastic turfy dells beneath which you could hear surreptitious waters gurgling ; and the Jardin mapped out below ; and then the paralysing clean emerald of the Clear Lake, set in a bevel of sloped green lawns beneath the raw red stone slopes from Croda Rossa, high overhead on the right. And all around us nothing but the untarnished empty glory of the Alpine lawns, incomparably gigantic beneath the naked piled wilderness of the peaks. Not for the first time did the exalted loneliness of high places take hold of me, and seize me out of myself,
"and charm away all wrinkles
That cares and frets and worries of our days
Had written in the forehead of my soul."
But never, I think, have I known quite so scarifying a spring-cleaning as I endured at the hands of that high basin of the Alps, so vast and pure, without touch or taint of man since the beginning of time, and on to the unutterable end. No wonder if the Holy Ones haunt the great heights and draw from them their holiness.
How powerful are the wings of man's fancy : how feeble the efforts of man's legs. Small marvel the Hebrew Lord takes no delight in them. Despite the blank white bliss of my inner mood, it as a toilful puffing person who agonized up and down the swells of those virgin lawns. They were now all fired to russet by early frosts : their brief life was over, and their winter at hand. But meanwhile they had burst into a final flare of glory with Gentians and Saxifrages.
[This is an occasional series of postings inspired by Abigail Rorer, Mimpish Squinnies: Reginald Farrer's Short Guide to Worthless Plants. Rorer's book includes prints of fourteen plants Farrer considered worthless-- an interesting hybrid of botanically accurate and...different. You can see her work, including all fourteen mimpish squinnies, here: http://www.theloneoakpress.com/prints/newer.html ]
THE RAINBOW BRIDGE
The Hastened End, pp. 274-276
Down the depths of the Dene we rode, and up the shingled miles of the confluent river, meeting, in the alder-coppice of the boulder-bed, with the abandoned antlers of an elk, left there till its lucky murderer should have time to come and reclaim them. Then up the mountain-side we still rode, and up to the Ma-chang, and up and up and up into the Alp, and over its bays and folds, till we actually attained on horseback to the mountain of black blocks above the Clear Lake.
It is a curious place, so loose a compilation of somber vast rocks that the turf between is springy with unfilled holes beneath, and there are deep caverns and hollows everywhere among the boulders, and water trickling and lurking, as if the whole hill were a sponge. As it indeed is, a slack-woven texture, full of pores and passages, lightly accumulated, and never settled down into solidity. Here we encamped; Bill in one tent, and I in another, and the staff in the big white one, lent us by the Viceroy of the Koko-Nor.
Close below lies the Clear Lake, down a steep climb among the dips and dells of the boulder-mountain. But at its head there intervenes the Jardin of which I spoke, a smooth delta of becks and rills converging to the Lake. And, as I now patrolled it gently, while the tents were being established, i realized with a certain sardonic amusement that all my other expeditions in the Da-Tung Alps had been wasted. For here, in this stretch of a quarter of a mile across and a hundred yards deep, occurred every high Alpine flower that I had found in the whole course of the season's arduous and unrewarding expeditions with the solitary exception of Primula urticifolia, immovably calcicole. It was a bewilderingly enrapturing place, with its paradoxical population, seeded down from the heights or translated by the becks. All the Poppies were there, all the Primulas, and many another adminicle of delight. And they all looked like guests and aliens, gathered together in one space by Nature's special invitation. I benignly revelled among the seeds, now ripe for the gathering, even to the prevalent Alpine Saxifrage of these ranges a feathery spire of white stars, rising from a rosette of very handsome glossy primuloid foliage : and each star with a pompous fat eye of black-purple, from the conspicuous swollen carpels. I suspect this of being S. egregia ; anyhow it abounds all over the high lawns of the Da-Tung, and descends to the foot of the Pass. But why pause on one pleasure, when there were so many more ? I was soon as fat as Humpty Dumpty, with swollen seed-packets bulging me out in every direction. Indeed, that Jardin at the head of the Clear Lake is perhaps the most entrancing collecting ground I have ever struck ; it was not with the altitude alone that my heart went boppoty-bop as I perused its gentle swards and shingle-flats.
That over-tried organ suffered greatly indeed, and did the oddest things. Wakeful through the nights I lay, with its rumblings and bumblings and stoppages ; it seemed to me to make such a noise that often I wondered if it was not avalanches in the silence of the lonely Alpine dark ; but heart-anguishes, hunger and weakness were all obliterated by the deifying glory of that place. Even in the doorway of my tent I was so happy that I could hardly breathe. All around me that tumble of mountainous dark conglomerate boulders, big as houses, with Isopyrum flopping purple in their crevices ; and down between them deep mossy caverns, or elastic turfy dells beneath which you could hear surreptitious waters gurgling ; and the Jardin mapped out below ; and then the paralysing clean emerald of the Clear Lake, set in a bevel of sloped green lawns beneath the raw red stone slopes from Croda Rossa, high overhead on the right. And all around us nothing but the untarnished empty glory of the Alpine lawns, incomparably gigantic beneath the naked piled wilderness of the peaks. Not for the first time did the exalted loneliness of high places take hold of me, and seize me out of myself,
"and charm away all wrinkles
That cares and frets and worries of our days
Had written in the forehead of my soul."
But never, I think, have I known quite so scarifying a spring-cleaning as I endured at the hands of that high basin of the Alps, so vast and pure, without touch or taint of man since the beginning of time, and on to the unutterable end. No wonder if the Holy Ones haunt the great heights and draw from them their holiness.
How powerful are the wings of man's fancy : how feeble the efforts of man's legs. Small marvel the Hebrew Lord takes no delight in them. Despite the blank white bliss of my inner mood, it as a toilful puffing person who agonized up and down the swells of those virgin lawns. They were now all fired to russet by early frosts : their brief life was over, and their winter at hand. But meanwhile they had burst into a final flare of glory with Gentians and Saxifrages.
[This is an occasional series of postings inspired by Abigail Rorer, Mimpish Squinnies: Reginald Farrer's Short Guide to Worthless Plants. Rorer's book includes prints of fourteen plants Farrer considered worthless-- an interesting hybrid of botanically accurate and...different. You can see her work, including all fourteen mimpish squinnies, here: http://www.theloneoakpress.com/prints/newer.html ]
