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 Chapter 6
Student: ___________________________________________________________________________

1. Using special software called a(n) __________, massive amounts of imagery can be compressed
to fit into a small data file.

________________________________________

2. When light reflected from an object passes through a video camera lens, that light is converted
into an electronic signal by a special sensor called an __________.

________________________________________

3. __________ video signals consist of a discrete color brightness value for each pixel on the
screen.

________________________________________

4. The __________ signal yields a less precise color definition because the signals are mixed
together and carried on a single cable.

________________________________________

5. __________ is what editors call the collection of general footage that supports the main theme or
narration.

________________________________________

6. __________ is fine adjustment of the tape during playback so that the tracks are properly aligned
as the tape moves across the playback head.

A. Tracking
B. Interlacing
C. Decompressing
D. Kerning

7. HDTV provides high resolution in which aspect ratio?

A. 1:2
B. 4:3
C. 16:9
D. 11:17
8. Computer displays use __________ technology, which draws the lines of an entire frame in a
single pass.

A. anti-aliasing
B. progressive-scan
C. de-interlacing
D. degaussing

9. DVD video uses __________ compression.

A. MPEG-4
B. VP8
C. VP6
D. MPEG-2

10. Smartphones and tablets use __________ technology.

A. CCD
B. CMOS
C. SECAM
D. PAL

11. Which of the following is not included in a standard studio lighting arrangement?

A. Block
B. Key
C. Rim
D. Fill

12. Blue screen or __________ editing is used to superimpose subjects over different backgrounds.

A. overscan
B. backlight
C. chroma key
D. moiré
13. Avoid re-editing repeatedly because video codecs are:

A. lossy
B. uncompressed
C. morphed
D. magnetic

14. Which of the following is not a container in which to put compressed data?

A. Ogg
B. QuickTime
C. SDI
D. WebM

15. Which of the following corrects for bluish, orange, or greenish color casts resulting from an
uneven distribution of colors.

A. Degaussing
B. Nonlinear editing
C. Underscan
D. White balance

16. Explain the difference between analog and digital video and give an example of when to use each
format.
 Chapter 6 Key

1. Using special software called a(n) __________, massive amounts of imagery can be
(p. 167) compressed to fit into a small data file.

codec
Chapter - Chapter 06 #1

2. When light reflected from an object passes through a video camera lens, that light is converted
(p. 167) into an electronic signal by a special sensor called an __________.

charge-coupled device or CCD

Chapter - Chapter 06 #2

3. __________ video signals consist of a discrete color brightness value for each pixel on the
(p. 168) screen.

Digital
Chapter - Chapter 06 #3

4. The __________ signal yields a less precise color definition because the signals are mixed
(p. 168) together and carried on a single cable.

composite
Chapter - Chapter 06 #4

5. __________ is what editors call the collection of general footage that supports the main theme
or narration.

B-roll
Chapter - Chapter 06 #5

6. __________ is fine adjustment of the tape during playback so that the tracks are properly
(p. 168) aligned as the tape moves across the playback head.

A. Tracking
B. Interlacing
C. Decompressing
D. Kerning
Chapter - Chapter 06 #6
7. HDTV provides high resolution in which aspect ratio?
(p. 169)

A. 1:2
B. 4:3
C. 16:9
D. 11:17
Chapter - Chapter 06 #7

8. Computer displays use __________ technology, which draws the lines of an entire frame in a
(p. 169) single pass.

A. anti-aliasing
B. progressive-scan
C. de-interlacing
D. degaussing
Chapter - Chapter 06 #8

9. DVD video uses __________ compression.

(p. 175)

A. MPEG-4
B. VP8
C. VP6
D. MPEG-2
Chapter - Chapter 06 #9

10. Smartphones and tablets use __________ technology.

(p. 167)

A. CCD
B. CMOS
C. SECAM
D. PAL
Chapter - Chapter 06 #10

11. Which of the following is not included in a standard studio lighting arrangement?
(p. 184)

A. Block
B. Key
C. Rim
D. Fill
Chapter - Chapter 06 #11
12. Blue screen or __________ editing is used to superimpose subjects over different
(p. 185) backgrounds.

A. overscan
B. backlight
C. chroma key
D. moiré
Chapter - Chapter 06 #12

13. Avoid re-editing repeatedly because video codecs are:

(p. 189)

A. lossy
B. uncompressed
C. morphed
D. magnetic
Chapter - Chapter 06 #13

14. Which of the following is not a container in which to put compressed data?
(p. 176)

A. Ogg
B. QuickTime
C. SDI
D. WebM
Chapter - Chapter 06 #14

15. Which of the following corrects for bluish, orange, or greenish color casts resulting from an
(p. 187) uneven distribution of colors.

A. Degaussing
B. Nonlinear editing
C. Underscan
D. White balance
Chapter - Chapter 06 #15
16. Explain the difference between analog and digital video and give an example of when to use
(p. 167) each format.

Analog video has a resolution measured in the number of horizontal scan lines (due to the
nature of early cathode tube cameras), but each of those lines represents continuous
measurements of the color and brightness along the horizontal axis in a linear signal that is
analogous to an audio signal. Analog video is cheaper to produce and best suited for audio
and video transmission with a limitation of the amount of data that can be transferred at one
time. Digital video signals, on the other hand, consist of a discrete color and brightness value
for each pixel on the screen. The more pixels, the higher the resolution. Digital video is more
expensive to produce and best suited for computers and digital electronics.

Chapter - Chapter 06 #16

 Chapter 6 Summary

Category # of Questions
Chapter - Chapter 06 16
Another random document with
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shrouded in purple gloom, and a great and solemn stillness brooded
over all.
Granite Crags (Edinburgh and London, 1884).
 THE GOLDEN HORN
(TURKEY)
ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE
The land breeze begins to rise, and we make use of it to approach
nearer and nearer to the Dardanelles. Already several large ships,
which like us are trying to make this difficult entrance, come near us;
their large grey sails, like the wings of night-birds, glide silently
between our brig and Tenedos; I go down below and fall asleep.
Break of day: I hear the rapid sailing of vessels and the little morning
waves that sound around the sides of the brig like the song of birds; I
open the port-hole, and I see on a chain of low and rounded hills the
castles of the Dardanelles with their white walls, their towers, and
their immense mouths for the cannon; the canal is scarcely more
than a league in width at this place; it winds, like a beautiful river,
between the exactly similar coasts of Asia and Europe. The castles
shut in this sea just like the two wings of a door; but in the present
condition of Turkey and Europe, it would be easy to force a passage
by sea, or to make a landing and take the forts from the rear; the
passage of the Dardanelles is not impregnable unless guarded by
the Russians.
The rapid current carries us on like an arrow before Gallipoli and the
villages bordering the canal; we see the isles in the Sea of Marmora
frowning before us; we follow the coast of Europe for two days and
two nights, thwarted by the north winds. In the morning we perceive
perfectly the isles of the princes, in the Sea of Marmora, and the Gulf
of Nicæa, and on our left the castle of the Seven Towers, and the
aërial tops of the innumerable minarets of Stamboul, in front of the
seven hills of Constantinople. At each tack, we discover something
new. At the first view of Constantinople, I experienced a painful
emotion of surprise and disillusion. “What! is this,” I asked myself,
“the sea, the shore, and the marvellous city for which the masters of
the world abandoned Rome and the coast of Naples? Is this that
capital of the universe, seated upon Europe and Asia; for which all
the conquering nations disputed by turns as the sign of the
supremacy of the world? Is this the city that painters and poets
imagine queen of cities seated upon her hills and her twin seas;
enclosed by her gulfs, her towers, her mountains, and containing all
the treasures of nature and the luxury of the Orient?” It is here that
one makes comparison with the Bay of Naples bearing its white city
upon its hollowed bosom like a vast amphitheatre; with Vesuvius
losing its golden brow in the clouds of smoke and purple lights, the
forest of Castellamare plunging its black foliage into the blue sea,
and the islands of Procida and Ischia with their volcanic peaks yellow
with vine-branches and white with villas, shutting in the immense bay
like gigantic moles thrown up by God himself at the entrance of this
port? I see nothing here to compare to that spectacle with which my
eyes are always enchanted; I am sailing, it is true, upon a beautiful
and lovely sea, but from the low coasts, rounded and monotonous
hills rear themselves; it is true that the snows of Olympus of Thrace
whiten the horizon, but they are only a white cloud in the sky and do
not make the landscape solemn enough. At the back of the gulf I see
nothing but the same rounded hills of the same height without rocks,
without coves, without indentations, and Constantinople, which the
pilot points out with his finger, is nothing but a white and
circumscribed city upon a large knoll on the European coast. Is it
worth while having come so far to be disenchanted? I did not wish to
look at it any longer; however, the ceaseless tackings of the ship
brought us sensibly nearer; we coasted along the castle of the
Seven Towers, an immense mediæval grey block, severe in
construction, which faces the sea at the angle of the Greek walls of
the ancient Byzantium, and we came to anchor beneath the houses
of Stamboul in the Sea of Marmora, in the midst of a host of ships
and boats delayed like ourselves from port by the violence of the
north winds. It was five o’clock, the sky was serene and the sun
brilliant; I began to recover from my disdain of Constantinople; the
walls that enclosed this portion of the city picturesquely built of the
débris of ancient walls and surmounted by gardens, kiosks and little
houses of wood painted red, formed the foreground of the picture;
above, the terraces of numerous houses rose in pyramid-like tiers,
story upon story, cut across with the tops of orange-trees and the
sharp, black spires of cypress; higher still, seven or eight large
mosques crowned the hill, and, flanked by their open-work minarets
and their mauresque colonnades, lifted into the sky their gilded
domes, flaming with the palpitating sunlight; the walls, painted with
tender blue, the leaden covers of the cupolas that encircled them,
gave them the appearance and the transparent glaze of monuments
of porcelain. The immemorial cypresses lend to these domes their
motionless and sombre peaks; and the various tints of the painted
houses of the city make the vast hill gay with all the colours of a
flower-garden. No noise issues from the streets; no lattice of the
innumerable windows opens; no movement disturbs the habitation of
such a great multitude of men: everything seems to be sleeping
under the broiling sunlight; the gulf, furrowed in every direction with
sails of all forms and sizes, alone gives signs of life. Every moment
we see vessels in full sail clear the Golden Horn (the opening of the
Bosphorus), the true harbour of Constantinople, passing by us flying
towards the Dardanelles; but we can not perceive the entrance of the
Bosphorus, nor even understand its position. We dine on the deck
opposite this magical spectacle; Turkish caïques come to question
us and to bring us provisions and food; the boatmen tell us that there
is no longer any plague; I send my letters to the city; at seven
o’clock, M. Truqui, the consul-general of Sardaigne, accompanied by
officers of his legation, comes to pay us a visit and offer us the
hospitality of his house in Pera; there is not the slightest hope of
finding a lodging in the recently burned city; the obliging cordiality,
and the attraction that M. Truqui inspires at the first moment, induces
us to accept. The contrary wind still blows, and the brigs cannot raise
anchor this evening: we sleep on board.
 THE GOLDEN HORN.
At five o’clock I am standing on the deck; the captain lowers a boat; I
descend with him, and we set sail towards the mouth of the
Bosphorus, coasting along the walls of Constantinople, which the
sea washes. After half an hour’s navigation through a multitude of
ships at anchor, we reach the walls of the Seraglio, which stand next
to those of the city, and form, at the extremity of the hill that bears
Stamboul, the angle that separates the Sea of Marmora from the
canal of the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn, or the grand inner
roadstead of Constantinople. It is here that God and man, nature and
art, have placed, or created, in concert the most marvellous view that
human eyes may contemplate upon the earth. I gave an involuntary
cry, and I forgot for ever the Bay of Naples and all its enchantments;
to compare anything to this magnificent and gracious combination
would be to insult creation.
The walls supporting the circular terraces of the immense gardens of
the great Seraglio were a few feet from us to our left, separated from
the sea by a narrow sidewalk of stone flags washed by the
ceaseless billows, where the perpetual current of the Bosphorus
formed little murmuring waves, as blue as those of the Rhône at
Geneva; these terraces that rise in gentle inclines up to the Sultan’s
palace, where you perceive the gilded domes across the gigantic
tops of the plantain-trees and the cypresses, are themselves planted
with enormous cypresses and plantains whose trunks dominate the
walls and whose boughs, spreading beyond the garden, hang over
the sea in cascades of foliage shadowing the caïques; the rowers
stop from time to time beneath their shade; every now and then
these groups of trees are interrupted by palaces, pavilions, kiosks,
doors sculptured and gilded opening upon the sea, or batteries of
cannon of copper and bronze in ancient and peculiar shapes.
Several pulls of the oar brought us to the precise point of the Golden
Horn where you enjoy at once a view of the Bosphorus, the Sea of
Marmora, and, finally, of the entire harbour, or, rather, the inland sea
of Constantinople; there we forgot Marmora, the coast of Asia, and
the Bosphorus, taking in with one glance the basin of the Golden
Horn and the seven cities seated upon the seven hills of
Constantinople, all converging towards the arm of the sea that forms
the unique and incomparable city, that is at the same time city,
country, sea, harbour, bank of flowers, gardens, wooded mountains,
deep valleys, an ocean of houses, a swarm of ships and streets,
tranquil lakes, and enchanted solitudes,—a view that no brush can
render except by details, and where each stroke of the oar gives the
eye and soul contradictory aspects and impressions.
We set sail towards the hills of Galata and Pera; the Seraglio
receded from us and grew larger in receding in proportion as the eye
embraced more and more the vast outlines of its walls and the
multitude of its roofs, its trees, its kiosks and its palaces. Of itself it is
sufficient to constitute a large city. The harbour hollows itself out
more and more before us; it winds like a canal between the flanks of
the curved mountains, and increases as we advance. The harbour
does not resemble a harbour in the least; it is rather a large river like
the Thames, enclosing the two coasts of the hills laden with towns,
and covered from one bank to the other with an interminable flotilla
of ships variously grouped the entire length of the houses. We pass
by this innumerable multitude of boats, some riding at anchor and
some about to set sail, sailing before the wind towards the
Bosphorus, towards the Black Sea, or towards the Sea of Marmora;
boats of all shapes and sizes and flags, from the Arabian barque,
whose prow springs and rises like the beak of antique galleys, to the
vessel of three decks with its glittering walls of bronze. Some flocks
of Turkish caïques, managed by one or two rowers in silken sleeves,
little boats that serve as carriages in the maritime streets of this
amphibious town, circulate between the large masses, cross and
knock against each other without overturning, and jostle one another
like a crowd in public places; and clouds of gulls, like beautiful white
pigeons, rise from the sea at their approach, to travel further away
and be rocked upon the waves. I did not try to count the vessels, the
ships, the brigs, the boats of all kinds and the barks that slept or
travelled in the harbour of Constantinople, from the mouth of the
Bosphorus and the point of the Seraglio to Eyoub and the delicious
valleys of sweet waters. The Thames at London offers nothing in
comparison. It will suffice to say that independently of the Turkish
flotilla and the European men-of-war at anchor in the centre of the
canal, the two sides of the Golden Horn are covered two or three
vessels deep for about a mile in length. We could only see the ocean
by looking between the file of prows and our glance lost itself at the
back of the gulf which contracted and ran into the shore amid a
veritable forest of masts.
I have just been strolling along the Asian shore on my return this
evening to Constantinople, and I find it a thousand times more
beautiful than the European shore. The Asian shore owes almost
nothing to man; everything here has been accomplished by nature.
Here there is no Buyukdere, no Therapia, no palace of
ambassadors, and no town of Armenians or Franks; there are only
mountains, gorges that separate them, little valleys carpeted with
meadows that seem to dig themselves out of the rocks, rivulets that
wind about them, cascades that whiten them with their foam, forests
that hang to their flanks, glide into their ravines, and descend to the
very edges of the innumerable coast gulfs; a variety of forms and
tints, and of leafy verdure, which the brush of a landscape-painter
could not even hope to suggest. Some isolated houses of sailors or
Turkish gardeners are scattered at great distances on the shore, or
thrown on the foreground of a wooded hill, or grouped upon the point
of rocks where the current carries you, and breaks into waves as
blue as the night sky; some white sails of fishermen, who creep
along the deep coves, which you see glide from one plane-tree to
another, like linen that the washerwomen fold; innumerable flights of
white birds that dry themselves on the edge of the meadows; eagles
that hover among the heights of the mountains near the sea;
mysterious creeks entirely shut in between rocks and trunks of
gigantic trees, whose boughs, overcharged with leaves, bend over
the waves and form upon the sea cradles wherein the caïques
creep. One or two villages hidden in the shadow of these creeks with
their gardens behind them on those green slopes, and their group of
trees at the foot of the rocks, with their barks rocked by the gentle
waves before their doors, their clouds of doves on the roofs, their
women and children at the windows, their old men seated beneath
the plane-trees at the foot of the minaret; labourers returning from
the fields in their caïques; others who have filled their barks with
green faggots, myrtle, or flowering heath to dry it for fuel in the
winter; hidden behind these heaps of slanting verdure that border
and descend into the water, you perceive neither the bark nor the
rower, and you believe that a portion of the bank detached from the
earth by the current is floating at haphazard on the sea with its green
foliage and its perfumed flowers. The shore presents this same
appearance as far as the castle of Mahomet II., which from this coast
also seems to shut in the Bosphorus like a Swiss lake; there, it
changes its character; the hills, less rugged, sink their flanks and
more gently hollow into narrow valleys; the Asiatic villages extend
more richly and nearer together; the Sweet Waters of Asia, a
charming little plain shadowed by trees and sown with kiosks and
Moorish fountains opens out to the vision.
Beyond the palace of Beglierby, the Asian coast again becomes
wooded and solitary as far as Scutari, which is as brilliant as a
garden of roses, at the extremity of a cape at the entrance of the Sea
of Marmora. Opposite, the verdant point of the Seraglio presents
itself to the eye; and between the European coast, crowned with its
three painted towns, and the coast of Stamboul, all glittering with its
cupolas and minarets, opens the immense port of Constantinople,
where the ships anchored at the two banks leave only one large
water-way for the caïques. I glide through this labyrinth of buildings,
as in a Venetian gondola under the shadow of palaces, and I land at
the échelle des Morts, under an avenue of cypresses.
Voyage en Orient (Paris, 1843).
 THE YELLOWSTONE[13]
(UNITED STATES)
RUDYARD KIPLING

“That desolate land and lone

Where the Big Horn and Yellowstone
Roar down their mountain path.”

Twice have I written this letter from end to end. Twice have I torn it
up, fearing lest those across the water should say that I had gone
mad on a sudden. Now we will begin for the third time quite solemnly
and soberly. I have been through the Yellowstone National Park in a
buggy, in the company of an adventurous old lady from Chicago and
her husband, who disapproved of scenery as being “ongodly.” I fancy
it scared them.
 COATING SPRINGS, YELLOWSTONE.
We began, as you know, with the Mammoth Hot Springs. They are
only a gigantic edition of those pink and white terraces not long ago
destroyed by earthquake in New Zealand. At one end of the little
valley in which the hotel stands the lime-laden springs that break
from the pine-covered hillsides have formed a frozen cataract of
white, lemon, and palest pink formations, through and over and in
which water of the warmest bubbles and drips and trickles from pale-
green lagoon to exquisitely fretted basin. The ground rings hollow as
a kerosene-tin, and some day the Mammoth Hotel, guests and all,
will sink into the caverns below and be turned into a stalactite. When
I set foot on the first of the terraces, a tourist-trampled ramp of
scabby grey stuff, I met a steam of iron-red hot water, which ducked
into a hole like a rabbit. Followed a gentle chuckle of laughter, and
then a deep, exhausted sigh from nowhere in particular. Fifty feet
above my head a jet of steam rose up and died out in the blue. It
was worse than the boiling mountain at Myanoshita. The dirty white
deposit gave place to lime whiter than snow; and I found a basin
which some learned hotel-keeper has christened Cleopatra’s pitcher,
or Mark Antony’s whisky-jug, or something equally poetical. It was
made of frosted silver; it was filled with water as clear as the sky. I do
not know the depth of that wonder. The eye looked down beyond
grottoes and caves of beryl into an abyss that communicated directly
with the central fires of earth. And the pool was in pain, so that it
could not refrain from talking about it; muttering and chattering and
moaning. From the lips of the lime-ledges, forty feet under water,
spurts of silver bubbles would fly up and break the peace of the
crystal atop. Then the whole pool would shake and grow dim, and
there were noises. I removed myself only to find other pools all
equally unhappy, rifts in the ground, full of running red-hot water,
slippery sheets of deposit overlaid with greenish grey hot water, and
here and there pit-holes dry as a rifled tomb in India, dusty and
waterless. Elsewhere the infernal waters had first boiled dead and
then embalmed the palms and underwood, or the forest trees had
taken heart and smothered up a blind formation with greenery, so
that it was only by scraping the earth you could tell what fires had
raged beneath. Yet the pines will win the battle in years to come,
because Nature, who first forges all her work in her great smithies,
has nearly finished this job, and is ready to temper it in the soft
brown earth. The fires are dying down; the hotel is built where
terraces have overflowed into flat wastes of deposit; the pines have
taken possession of the high ground whence the terraces first
started. Only the actual curve of the cataract stands clear, and it is
guarded by soldiers who patrol it with loaded six-shooters, in order
that the tourist may not bring up fence-rails and sink them in a pool,
or chip the fretted tracery of the formations with a geological
hammer, or, walking where the crust is too thin, foolishly cook
himself....
Next dawning, entering a buggy of fragile construction, with the old
people from Chicago, I embarked on my perilous career. We ran
straight up a mountain till we could see sixty miles away, the white
houses of Cook City on another mountain, and the whiplash-like trail
leading thereto. The live air made me drunk. If Tom, the driver, had
proposed to send the mares in a bee-line to the city, I should have
assented, and so would the old lady, who chewed gum and talked
about her symptoms. The tub-ended rock-dog, which is but the
translated prairie-dog, broke across the road under our horses’ feet,
the rabbit and the chipmunk danced with fright; we heard the roar of
the river, and the road went round a corner. On one side piled rock
and shale, that enjoined silence for fear of a general slide-down; on
the other a sheer drop, and a fool of a noisy river below. Then,
apparently in the middle of the road, lest any should find driving too
easy, a post of rock. Nothing beyond that save the flank of a cliff.
Then my stomach departed from me, as it does when you swing, for
we left the dirt, which was at least some guarantee of safety, and
sailed out round the curve, and up a steep incline, on a plank-road
built out from the cliff. The planks were nailed at the outer edge, and
did not shift or creak very much—but enough, quite enough. That
was the Golden Gate. I got my stomach back again when we trotted
out on to a vast upland adorned with a lake and hills. Have you ever
seen an untouched land—the face of virgin Nature? It is rather a
curious sight, because the hills are choked with timber that has
never known an axe, and the storm has rent a way through this
timber, so that a hundred thousand trees lie matted together in
swathes; and since each tree lies where it falls, you may behold
trunk and branch returning to the earth whence they sprang—exactly
as the body of man returns—each limb making its own little grave,
the grass climbing above the bark, till at last there remains only the
outline of a tree upon the rank undergrowth.
Then we drove under a cliff of obsidian, which is black glass, some
two hundred feet high; and the road at its foot was made of black
glass that crackled. This was no great matter, because half an hour
before Tom had pulled up in the woods that we might sufficiently
admire a mountain who stood all by himself, shaking with laughter or
rage....
Then by companies after tiffin we walked chattering to the uplands of
Hell. They call it the Norris Geyser Basin on Earth. It was as though
the tide of dissolution had gone out, but would presently return,
across innumerable acres of dazzling white geyser formation. There
were no terraces here, but all other horrors. Not ten yards from the
road a blast of steam shot up roaring every few seconds, a mud
volcano spat filth to Heaven, streams of hot water rumbled under
foot, plunged through the dead pines in steaming cataracts and died
on a waste of white where green-grey, black-yellow, and link pools
roared, shouted, bubbled, or hissed as their wicked fancies
prompted. By the look of the eye the place should have been frozen
over. By the feel of the feet it was warm. I ventured out among the
pools, carefully following tracks, but one unwary foot began to sink, a
squirt of water followed, and having no desire to descend quick into
Tophet I returned to the shore where the mud and the sulphur and
the nameless fat ooze-vegetation of Lethe lay. But the very road
rang as though built over a gulf; and besides how was I to tell when
the raving blast of steam would find its vent insufficient and blow the
whole affair into Nirvana? There was a potent stench of stale eggs
everywhere, and crystals of sulphur crumbled under the foot, and the
glare of the sun on the white stuff was blinding....
We curved the hill and entered a forest of spruce, the path
serpentining between the tree-boles, the wheels running silent on
immemorial mould. There was nothing alive in the forest save
ourselves. Only a river was speaking angrily somewhere to the right.
For miles we drove till Tom bade us alight and look at certain falls.
Wherefore we stepped out of that forest and nearly fell down a cliff
which guarded a tumbled river and returned demanding fresh
miracles. If the water had run uphill, we should perhaps have taken
more notice of it; but ’twas only a waterfall, and I really forget
whether the water was warm or cold. There is a stream here called
Firehole River. It is fed by the overflow from the various geysers and
basins,—a warm and deadly river wherein no fish breed. I think we
crossed it a few dozen times in the course of the day.
Then the sun began to sink, and there was a taste of frost about, and
we went swiftly from the forest into the open, dashed across a
branch of the Firehole River and found a wood shanty, even rougher
than the last, at which, after a forty mile drive, we were to dine and
sleep. Half a mile from this place stood, on the banks of the Firehole
River a “beaver-lodge,” and there were rumours of bears and other
cheerful monsters in the woods on the hill at the back of the
building....
Once upon a time there was a carter who brought his team and a
friend into the Yellowstone Park without due thought. Presently they
came upon a few of the natural beauties of the place, and that carter
turned his friend’s team, howling: “Get back o’ this, Tim. All Hell’s
alight under our noses.” And they call the place Hell’s Half-acre to
this day. We, too, the old lady from Chicago, her husband, Tom, and
the good little mares came to Hell’s Half-acre, which is about sixty
acres, and when Tom said: “Would you like to drive over it?” we said:
“Certainly no, and if you do, we shall report you to the authorities.”
There was a plain, blistered and puled and abominable, and it was
given over to the sportings and spoutings of devils who threw mud
and steam and dirt at each other with whoops and halloos and
bellowing curses. The place smelt of the refuse of the Pit, and that
odour mixed with the clean, wholesome aroma of the pines in our
nostrils throughout the day. Be it known that the Park is laid out, like
Ollendorf, in exercises of progressive difficulty. Hell’s Half-acre was a
prelude to ten or twelve miles of geyser formation. We passed hot
streams boiling in the forest; saw whiffs of steam beyond these, and
yet other whiffs breaking through the misty green hills in the far
distance; we trampled on sulphur, and sniffed things much worse
than any sulphur which is known to the upper world; and so came
upon a park-like place where Tom suggested we should get out and
play with the geysers.
Imagine mighty green fields splattered with lime beds: all the flowers
of the summer growing up to the very edge of the lime. That was the
first glimpse of the geyser basins. The buggy had pulled up close to
a rough, broken, blistered cone of stuff between ten and twenty feet
high. There was trouble in that place—moaning, splashing, gurgling,
and the clank of machinery. A spurt of boiling water jumped into the
air and a wash of water followed. I removed swiftly. The old lady from
Chicago shrieked. “What a wicked waste!” said her husband. I think
they call it the Riverside Geyser. Its spout was torn and ragged like
the mouth of a gun when a shell has burst there. It grumbled madly
for a moment or two and then was still. I crept over the steaming lime
—it was the burning marl on which Satan lay—and looked fearfully
down its mouth. You should never look a gift geyser in the mouth. I
beheld a horrible slippery, slimy funnel with water rising and falling
ten feet at a time. Then the water rose to lip level with a rush and an
infernal bubbling troubled this Devil’s Bethesda before the sullen
heave of the crest of a wave lapped over the edge and made me
run. Mark the nature of the human soul! I had begun with awe, not to
say terror. I stepped back from the flanks of the Riverside Geyser
saying: “Pooh! Is that all it can do?” Yet for aught I knew the whole
thing might have blown up at a minute’s notice; she, he, or it, being
an arrangement of uncertain temper.
We drifted on up that miraculous valley. On either side of us were
hills from a thousand to fifteen feet high and wooded from heel to
crest. As far as the eye could range forward were columns of steam
in the air, misshapen lumps of lime, most like preadamite monsters,
still pools of turquoise blue, stretches of blue cornflowers, a river that
coiled on itself twenty times, boulders of strange colours, and ridges
of glaring, staring white.
The old lady from Chicago poked with her parasol at the pools as
though they had been alive. On one particularly innocent-looking
little puddle she turned her back for a moment, and there rose
behind her a twenty-foot column of water and steam. Then she
shrieked and protested that “she never thought it would ha’ done it,”
and the old man chewed his tobacco steadily, and mourned for
steam power wasted. I embraced the whitened stump of a middle-
sized pine that had grown all too close to a hot pool’s lip, and the
whole thing turned over under my hand as a tree would do in a
nightmare. From right and left came the trumpetings of elephants at
play. I stepped into a pool of old dried blood rimmed with the nodding
cornflowers; the blood changed to ink even as I trod; and ink and
blood were washed away in a spurt of boiling sulphurous water spat
out from the lee of a bank of flowers. This sounds mad, doesn’t it?...
We rounded a low spur of hills, and came out upon a field of aching
snowy lime, rolled in sheets, twisted into knots, riven with rents and
diamonds and stars, stretching for more than half a mile in every
direction. In this place of despair lay most of the big geysers who
know when there is trouble in Krakatoa, who tell the pines when
there is a cyclone on the Atlantic seaboard, and who—are exhibited
to visitors under pretty and fanciful names. The first mound that I
encountered belonged to a goblin splashing in his tub. I heard him
kick, pull a shower-bath on his shoulders, gasp, crack his joints, and
rub himself down with a towel; then he let the water out of the bath,
as a thoughtful man should, and it all sank down out of sight till
another goblin arrived. Yet they called this place the Lioness and the
Cubs. It lies not very far from the Lion, which is a sullen, roaring
beast, and they say that when it is very active the other geysers
presently follow suit. After the Krakatoa eruption all the geysers went
mad together, spouting, spurting, and bellowing till men feared that
they would rip up the whole field. Mysterious sympathies exist
among them, and when the Giantess speaks (of her more anon) they
all hold their peace.
I was watching a solitary spring, when, far across the fields, stood up
a plume of spun glass, iridescent and superb against the sky. “That,”
said the trooper, “is Old Faithful. He goes off every sixty-five minutes
to the minute, plays for five minutes, and sends up a column of water
a hundred and fifty feet high. By the time you have looked at all the
other geysers he will be ready to play.”
So we looked and we wondered at the Beehive, whose mouth is built
up exactly like a hive; at the Turban (which is not in the least like a
turban); and at many, many other geysers, hot holes, and springs.
Some of them rumbled, some hissed, some went off spasmodically,
and others lay still in sheets of sapphire and beryl.
Would you believe that even these terrible creatures have to be
guarded by troopers to prevent the irreverent American from
chipping the cones to pieces, or worse still, making the geysers sick?
If you take of soft-soap a small barrelful and drop it down a geyser’s
mouth, that geyser will presently be forced to lay all before you and
for days afterwards will be of an irritated and inconsistent stomach.
When they told me the tale I was filled with sympathy. Now I wish
that I had stolen soap and tried the experiment on some lonely little
beast of a geyser in the woods. It sounds so probable—and so
human.
Yet he would be a bold man who would administer emetics to the
Giantess. She is flat-lipped, having no mouth, she looks like a pool,
fifty feet long and thirty wide, and there is no ornamentation about
her. At irregular intervals she speaks, and sends up a column of
water over two hundred feet high to begin with; then she is angry for
a day and a half—sometimes for two days. Owing to her peculiarity
of going mad in the night not many people have seen the Giantess at
her finest; but the clamour of her unrest, men say, shakes the
wooden hotel, and echoes like thunder among the hills. When I saw
her; trouble was brewing. The pool bubbled seriously, and at five-
minute intervals, sank a foot or two, then rose, washed over the rim,
and huge steam bubbles broke on the top. Just before an eruption
the water entirely disappears from view. Whenever you see the
water die down in a geyser-mouth get away as fast as you can. I saw
a tiny little geyser suck in its breath in this way, and instinct made me
retire while it hooted after me. Leaving the Giantess to swear, and
spit, and thresh about, we went over to Old Faithful, who by reason
of his faithfulness has benches close to him whence you may
comfortably watch. At the appointed hour we heard the water flying
up and down the mouth with the sob of waves in a cave. Then came
the preliminary gouts, then a roar and a rush, and that glittering
column of diamonds rose, quivered, stood still for a minute; then it
broke, and the rest was a confused snarl of water not thirty feet high.
All the young ladies—not more than twenty—in the tourist band
remarked that it was “elegant,” and betook themselves to writing
their names in the bottoms of shallow pools. Nature fixes the insult
indelibly, and the after-years will learn that “Hattie,” “Sadie,” “Mamie,”
“Sophie,” and so forth, have taken out their hair-pins, and scrawled
in the face of Old Faithful....
Next morning Tom drove us on, promising new wonders. He pulled
up after a few miles at a clump of brushwood where an army was
drowning. I could hear the sick gasps and thumps of the men going
under, but when I broke through the brushwood the hosts had fled,
and there were only pools of pink, black, and white lime, thick as
turbid honey. They shot up a pat of mud every minute or two,
choking in the effort. It was an uncanny sight. Do you wonder that in
the old days the Indians were careful to avoid the Yellowstone?
Geysers are permissible, but mud is terrifying. The old lady from
Chicago took a piece of it, and in half an hour it died into lime-dust
and blew away between her fingers. All maya—illusion,—you see!
Then we clinked over sulphur in crystals; there was a waterfall of
boiling water; and a road across a level park hotly contested by the
beavers....
As we climbed the long path the road grew viler and viler till it
became without disguise, the bed of a torrent; and just when things
were at their rockiest we emerged into a little sapphire lake—but
never sapphire was so blue—called Mary’s lake; and that between
eight and nine thousand feet above the sea. Then came grass
downs, all on a vehement slope, so that the buggy following the new-
made road ran on to the two off-wheels mostly, till we dipped head-
first into a ford, climbed up a cliff, raced along a down, dipped again
and pulled up dishevelled at “Larry’s” for lunch and an hour’s rest....
The sun was sinking when we heard the roar of falling waters and
came to a broad river along whose banks we ran. And then—oh,
then! I might at a pinch describe the infernal regions, but not the
other place. Be it known to you that the Yellowstone River has
occasion to run through a gorge about eight miles long. To get to the
bottom of the gorge it makes two leaps, one of about 120 and the
other of 300 feet. I investigated the upper or lesser fall, which is
close to the hotel. Up to that time nothing particular happens to the
Yellowstone, its banks being only rocky, rather steep, and plentifully
adorned with pines. At the falls it comes round a corner, green, solid,
ribbed with a little foam, and not more than thirty yards wide. Then it
goes over still green and rather more solid than before. After a
minute or two you, sitting on a rock directly above the drop, begin to
understand that something has occurred; that the river has jumped a
huge distance between the solid cliff walls and what looks like the
gentle froth of ripples lapping the sides of the gorge below is really
the outcome of great waves. And the river yells aloud; but the cliffs
do not allow the yells to escape.
That inspection began with curiosity and finished in terror, for it
seemed that the whole world was sliding in chrysolite from under my
feet. I followed with the others round the corner to arrive at the brink
of the cañon; we had to climb up a nearly perpendicular ascent to
begin with, for the ground rises more than the river drops. Stately
pine woods fringe either lip of the gorge, which is—the Gorge of the
Yellowstone.
All I can say is that without warning or preparation I looked into a gulf
1,700 feet deep with eagles and fish-hawks circling far below. And
the sides of that gulf were one wild welter of colour—crimson,
emerald, cobalt, ochre, amber, honey splashed with port-wine, snow-
white, vermilion, lemon, and silver-grey, in wide washes. The sides
did not fall sheer, but were graven by time and water and air into
monstrous heads of kings, dead chiefs, men and women of the old
time. So far below that no sound of its strife could reach us, the
Yellowstone River ran—a finger-wide strip of jade-green. The
sunlight took these wondrous walls and gave fresh hues to those
that nature had already laid there. Once I saw the dawn break over a
lake in Rajputana and the sun set over Oodey Sagar amid a circle of
Holman Hunt hills. This time I was watching both performances
going on below me—upside down you understand—and the colours
were real! The cañon was burning like Troy town; but it would not
burn forever, and, thank goodness, neither pen nor brush could ever
portray its splendours adequately. The Academy would reject the
picture for a chromo-lithograph. The public would scoff at the letter-
press for Daily Telegraphese. “I will leave this thing alone,” said I;
“’tis my peculiar property. Nobody else shall share it with me.”
Evening crept through the pines that shadowed us, but the full glory
of the day flamed in that cañon as we went out very cautiously to a
jutting piece of rock—blood-red or pink it was—that overhung the
deepest deeps of all. Now I know what it is to sit enthroned amid the
clouds of sunset. Giddiness took away all sensation of touch or form;
but the sense of blinding colour remained. When I reached the
mainland again I had sworn that I had been floating.
From Sea to Sea: Letters of Travel (New York, 1899).

FOOTNOTE:
[13] Published by permission of Rudyard Kipling. Copyright, 1899,
by Rudyard Kipling.