Читать книгу Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 422 - Various - Страница 2

Robinson Crusoe is the parent of a line of fictions, all more or less entertaining; but those of our own day, as might be expected, share largely in the practical spirit of the time, making amusement in some degree the mere menstruum of information. Following the Swiss Family Robinson, we have here an English Family Robinson, which might as well be called an American Family Robinson; and although ostensibly meant for the holiday recreation of youth, it proves to be a production equally well suited for children of six feet and upwards. The author is personally familiar with the scenes he describes, and is thus able to give them a verisimilitude which in other circumstances can be attained only by the rarest genius; and notwithstanding the associations, of his last book, the Scalp-hunters, there is only one bloody conflict in the present one fought by animals of the genus Homo.

The local habitation of the lost family is a nook in the Great American Desert—a nook in a desert twenty-five times the size of England! But this wilderness of about a million square miles is not all sand or all barren earth: it contains numerous other features of interest besides mountains and oases; it includes the country of New Mexico, with its towns and cities; the country round the Great Salt and Utah Lakes, where the germ of a Mormon nation is expanding on all sides; and it is traversed in its whole breadth by the Rocky Mountains. An English family, after being ruined in St Louis, and reduced to their last hundred pounds, are persuaded by a Scottish miner to accompany him across this desert to New Mexico. 'They are a wonderful people,' says the story-teller, 'these same Scotch. They are but a small nation, yet their influence is felt everywhere upon the globe. Go where you will, you will find them in positions of trust and importance—always prospering, yet, in the midst of prosperity, still remembering, with strong feelings of attachment, the land of their birth. They manage the marts of London, the commerce of India, the fur-trade of America, and the mines of Mexico. Over all the American wilderness you will meet them, side by side with the backwoods-pioneer himself, and even pushing him from his own ground. From the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Sea, they have impressed with their Gaelic names rock, river, and mountain; and many an Indian tribe owns a Scotchman for its chief.'

The adventurers join a caravan, which is attacked by Indians, and the family of the destined Robinson find themselves alone in the wilderness, 800 miles from the American frontier on the east, 1000 miles from any civilised settlement on either the north or south, and 200 miles from the farthest advanced lines of New Mexico in the desert. They are, in short, lost; but in due time they are found again by other explorers. These strangers are standing on the edge of a cliff several hundred feet sheer down. 'Away below—far below where we were—lay a lovely valley, smiling in all the luxuriance of bright vegetation. It was of nearly an oval shape, bounded upon all sides by a frowning precipice, that rose around it like a wall. Its length could not have been less than ten miles, and its greatest breadth about half of its length. We were at its upper end, and of course viewed it lengthwise. Along the face of the precipice there were trees hanging out horizontally, and some of them even growing with their tops downward. These trees were cedars and pines; and we could perceive also the knotted limbs of huge cacti protruding from the crevices of the rocks. We could see the wild mezcal, or maguey-plant, growing against the cliff—its scarlet leaves contrasting finely with the dark foliage of the cedars and cacti. Some of these plants stood out on the very brow of the overhanging precipice, and their long curving blades gave a singular character to the landscape. Along the face of the dark cliffs all was rough, and gloomy, and picturesque. How different was the scene below! Here everything looked soft, and smiling, and beautiful. There were broad stretches of woodland, where the thick foliage of the trees met and clustered together, so that it looked like the surface of the earth itself; but we knew it was only the green leaves, for here and there were spots of brighter green, that we saw were glades covered with grassy turf. The leaves of the trees were of different colours, for it was now late in the autumn. Some were yellow, and some of a deep claret colour: some were bright-red, and some of a beautiful maroon; and there were green, and brighter green, and others of a silvery-whitish hue. All these colours were mingled together, and blended into each other, like the flowers upon a rich carpet. Near the centre of the valley was a large shining object, which we knew to be water. It was evidently a lake of crystal purity, and smooth as a mirror. The sun was now up to meridian height, and his yellow beams falling upon its surface caused it to gleam like a sheet of gold. We could not trace the outlines of the water, for the trees partially hid it from our view, but we saw that the smoke that had at first attracted us rose up somewhere from the western shore of the lake.' In this strange oasis they found what appeared to be a snug farm-house, with stables and outhouses, garden and fields, horses and cattle. Here they were hospitably entertained by the proprietor, his wife, and two sons, and served by a faithful negro; and of course it is the history of the settlers, and their struggles, expedients, and contrivances which form the staple of the work.

In this history we have the process of building a log-house, and the usual modes of assembling round the squatter such of the comforts of life as may be obtained in the desert; but our family Robinson appears to have been the most ingenious as well as the most fortunate of adventurers, for there are very few, even of the luxuries of civilised society, which are beyond his reach. The natural history of the book, however, is its main feature; and the adventures of the lost family with the unreasoning denizens of the desert remind us not unfrequently of the pictures of Audubon. This is among the earliest:—'There were high cliffs fronting us, and along the face of these five large reddish objects were moving, so fast that I at first thought they were birds upon the wing. After watching them a moment, however, I saw that they were quadrupeds; but so nimbly did they go, leaping from ledge to ledge, that it was impossible to see their limbs. They appeared to be animals of the deer species, somewhat larger than sheep or goats; but we could see that, in place of antlers, each of them had a pair of huge curving horns. As they leaped downward, from one platform of the cliffs to another, we fancied that they whirled about in the air, as though they were "turning somersaults," and seemed at times to come down heads foremost! There was a spur of the cliff that sloped down to within less than a hundred yards of the place where we sat. It ended in an abrupt precipice, of some sixty or seventy feet in height above the plain. The animals, on reaching the level of this spur, ran along it until they had arrived at its end. Seeing the precipice, they suddenly stopped, as if to reconnoitre it; and we had now a full view of them, as they stood outlined against the sky, with their graceful limbs and great curved horns, almost as large as their bodies. We thought, of course, they could get no farther for the precipice, and I was calculating whether my rifle, which I had laid hold of, would reach them at that distance. All at once, to our astonishment, the foremost sprang out from the cliff, and whirling through the air, lit upon his head on the hard plain below! We could see that he came down upon his horns, and rebounding up again to the height of several feet, he turned a second somersault, and then dropped upon his legs, and stood still! Nothing daunted, the rest followed, one after the other, in quick succession, like so many street-tumblers; and, like them, after the feat had been performed, the animals stood for a moment, as if waiting for applause!' These were the argali, or wild sheep, popularly termed bighorns, and resembling an immense yellow goat or deer furnished with a pair of ram's horns.

Such are the anecdotes which the reader will find thickly scattered throughout this volume; but perhaps the most interesting are a series of conflicts witnessed by the father and one of the sons, and in the course of which they are themselves exposed to some danger. They had gone out to gather from the live oaks a kind of moss, which they found to be quite equal to curled hair for stuffing mattresses; and while perched upon one of the trees, the drama opened by the violent scolding of a pair of orioles, or Baltimore birds—so called from their colour, a mixture of black and orange, being the same as that in the coat-of-arms of Lord Baltimore. The cause of the disturbance appeared to be a nondescript animal close to the edge of the thicket, with a variety of little legs, tails, heads, ears, and eyes stuck over its body. 'All at once the numerous heads seemed to separate from the main body, becoming little bodies of themselves, with long tails upon them, and looking just like a squad of white rats! The large body to which they had all been attached we now saw was an old female opossum, and evidently the mother of the whole troop. She was about the size of a cat, and covered with woolly hair of a light gray colour.... The little 'possums were exact pictures of their mother—all having the same sharp snouts and long naked tails. We counted no less than thirteen of them, playing and tumbling about among the leaves.' The old 'possum looked wistfully up at the nest of the orioles, hanging like a distended stocking from the topmost twigs of the tree. After a little consideration she uttered a sharp note, which brought the little ones about her in a twinkling. 'Several of them ran into the pouch which she had caused to open for them; two of them took a turn of their little tails around the root of hers, and climbed up on her rump, almost burying themselves in her long wool; while two or three others fastened themselves about her neck and shoulders. It was a most singular sight to see the little creatures holding on with "tails, teeth, and toe-nails," while some peeped comically out of the great breast-pocket.' Burdened in this way, she climbed the tree, and then taking hold of the young 'possums, one by one, with her mouth, she made them twist their tails round a branch, and hang with their heads downwards. 'Five or six of the "kittens" were still upon the ground. For these she returned, and taking them up as before, again climbed the tree. She disposed of the second load precisely as she had done the others, until the thirteen little possums hung head downwards along the branch like a string of candles!'