But let him
see the Tagus at Toledo, and what he finds is brown rolling mud, pouring
solid after the rains, or sluggish and hardly a river after long
drought. Let him go down the Tiber, down the Valley of the Tiber, on
foot, and he will retain until the last miles an impression of nothing
but a turbid mountain torrent, mixed with the friable soil in its bed.
Let him approach the Mississippi in the most part of its long course and
the novelty will be more striking still. It will not seem to him a river
at all (if he be from Northern Europe); it will seem a chance flood. He
will come to it through marshes and through swamps, crossing a deserted
backwater, finding firm land beyond, then coming to further shallow
patches of wet, out of which the tree-stumps stand, and beyond which
again mud-heaps and banks and groups of reeds leave undetermined, for
one hundred yards after another, the limits of the vast stream. At last,
if he has a boat with him, he may make some place where he has a clear
view right across to low trees, tiny from their distance, similarly half
swamped upon a further shore, and behind them a low escarpment of bare
earth. That is the Mississippi nine times out of ten, and to an
Englishman who had expected to find from his early reading or his maps a
larger Thames it seems for all the world like a stretch of East Anglian
flood, save that it is so much more desolate.
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