4i2 



KNOWLEDGE 



[Febkhaby 1, 1900. 



pole, with cross pieces nailed to it, is set up iu the 

 village, so that the watchman can ascertain the locality 

 of a fire, when roused by the glow against the sky. The 

 browu acres are ploughed from the roadside to the 

 horizon, and the farmer can view his twenty-two pairs of 

 oxen moving, at wide intervals, across one even field 

 (Fig. 1). The little towns exist purely for the cultiva- 



FlG. 1. Ploughing in the r.a,.i ^l \\ t.-Ltru Hungary. 



tors of the soil, and a market-day clears the country 

 round. In the afternoon, however, the peasants will 

 stream out again, hundreds of swaying rustic carts will 

 follow one another down the road; and the clear gold 

 sunset, a veritable sunset of the jjlains, will add its 

 colour to the crimson and blue and orange of the 

 dresses of sober matrons, or to the white kerchiefs of 

 bronzed and laughing girls. 



We are, in fact, approaching the first of the great 

 Alpine rivers; for at L^ndva we enter on a valley, 

 which varies from 7 to 16 kilometres (10 miles) in 

 width — a valley choked with sand and pebbles, spread 

 out by successive shiftinjs of the stream. Against the 

 southern bank, which is at present favoured, the Mur 

 runs among its sandy shoals. Here, in the middle of a 

 continent, the river already lies only 160 metres above 

 the sea; and it shortly lets its waters slip, as if ex- 

 hausted, into the greater current of the Drava. 



How should we know this river, this lowland Mur, for 

 that which we have seen in flood through Styria, tearing 

 at its banks, washing away roads and houses, rejoicing 

 to run its course amonj; the shattered forests of the 

 Alps? Or is it the same that flows at its birth through 

 all those resonant ravines, as we come down from the 

 crags of the Tauern, whei'e the chill clouds move 

 against the walls of rock, and feed each night the grow- 

 ing streamlets in the clefts ? Truly, the rivers depend 

 for their life upon the mountains ; and they are always 

 undoing themselves, wearing away their gathering- 

 grounds, and choking up their ow i courses in +he lower 

 reaches of their valleys. 



There is quite a ridge, comparatively speaking, be- 

 tween the Mui- and the Drava. In this level counti-y it 

 is an incident in itself, hough the summit lies about 

 as high as Richmond Hill above the Thames. Beyond 

 it is the flat in which the Drava wanders. Here we 



have a river indeed, with a long course yet before it; 

 but it divides already into a number of loops and back- 

 waters, and all attempts to use it as a boundary between 

 Hungary and Croatia have failed. You may see upon 

 a detailed map how the official frontier curves this way 

 and that, representing, no doubt, some ancient windings 

 of the stream ; but new routes are always opening 

 among the alluvial islets, and a fringe a kilometre wide 

 on either hand is abandoned to the chances of the floods. 

 The river, in its numerous channels, flows silently 

 between banks of grey-green willows, which hide the 

 water until we are close upon it. At last we find the 

 main artery, spanned by ,-, long iron bridge ; we are 

 now again only 160 metres above the sea, which lies at 

 Varna, as the crow flies, 600 miles away. 



The Drava, traced back as the German Drau, has 

 done its work at higher levels. It rises at a height of 

 1300 metres among the stone-slides and fir-woods of 

 the dolomites of Toblach ; we may follow it, reinforced 

 by noisy brooks, through the flood-swept gorge of Lienz, 

 one of the most impressive scenes of rock-destruction to 

 be found in the whole of Europe; we may see it swirl- 

 ing the timber- rafts upon its bosom through the ravine 

 of Sachsenburg, and then emerging, with an air of 

 innocence, among the maize-fields and farmsteads of 

 Paternion. Soon, where the clear green Gail flows into 

 it, we hear of it as the Drava, in the soft and grave 

 Slavonic speech. It cuts its way for another eighty 

 kilometres to Marburg in Styria, often lying deep 

 between vertical walls of rock ; and then ultimately 

 it becomes weai^ied, and covers the country to Varasdin 

 and the Danube with the spoils of Karinthia and 

 Tyrol. 



In fact, these great i eastwaid-flowing livers have 

 worn their way down practically as far as they can, 

 and have reached almost the same levels in the plain ; 

 and now, as their flow becomes more sluggish, they may 

 even tend to raise themselves on their own alluvium, 

 instead of cutting out a groove in it. Their history 

 has been much the same ; doubtless they began to 

 flow when the Alps at first arose; and they may thus 

 have fallen at one time into the late Miocene sea of 

 eastern Europe. Soon, however, this sea was banked 

 out by continued uplift of the land ; brackish and 

 fresh-water lakes replaced it in the west of Hungary ; 

 and then these also disappeared, their floors being 

 raised against the cutting action of the streams. A num- 

 ber of shallow valleys have now been excavated, and the 

 rivers from the Alps, with the spread of the continent, 

 have grown longer and longer towards the cast. The 

 removal of matter from Styria and Karinthia to the 

 plains has been going on since early Pliocene times. 

 The pebble-beds that we have traversed on the plateaux 

 contain all manner of old rocks, quartzite and schist 

 and gneiss, clearly deriv d from th? central portions of 

 the chain; and all this detritus has filled up pre- 

 existing hollows, and has buried deeper than ever the 

 unseen prolongations o? the Alps. 



If, however, the invisible ridges below us continue to 

 rise, the period of deposition may pass away. But are 

 upward movements in progress, or is merely settlement 

 going on? In Switzerland, the conversion of long 

 mountain-valleys into lakes, such as those of Lucerne 

 and Como, points already to a sinking of the central 

 massif. But this indication of old age is absent in the 

 younger ranges to the east; and Switzerland was 

 already high and dry when Italy and parts of Austriar 

 Hungary lay still beneath a Cainozoic sea. Hence 

 elevation may still be going on in the east, and the 



