Richard Halliburton’s Book of Marvels: The Occident

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Text originally published in 1937 under the same title.

© Papamoa Press 2018, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

RICHARD HALLIBURTON’S BOOK OF MARVELS:

THE OCCIDENT

BY

RICHARD HALLIBURTON

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

INTRODUCTION 4

THE OCCIDENT 6

CHAPTER I—A MARVELOUS BRIDGE 6

CHAPTER II—THE GOLDEN GATE 12

CHAPTER III—THE HIGHEST WATERFALL 18

CHAPTER IV—THE DEEPEST CANYON 26

CHAPTER V—THE GREATEST DAM 33

CHAPTER VI—NIAGARA 42

CHAPTER VII—NEW YORK 50

CHAPTER VIII—WASHINGTON 65

CHAPTER IX—FORT JEFFERSON 77

CHAPTER X—POPOCATEPETL 87

CHAPTER XI—THE RAIN GOD’S CITY 97

CHAPTER XII—CHRISTOPHE’S CASTLE 107

CHAPTER XIII—THE PANAMA CANAL 113

CHAPTER XIV—THE ANGEL ARCHITECTS 124

CHAPTER XV—IGUAZU FALLS 133

CHAPTER XVI—THE RIVER OF JANUARY 139

CHAPTER XVII—GIBRALTAR 150

CHAPTER XVIII—CARCASSONNE 158

CHAPTER XIX—MOUNT ST. MICHAEL 165

CHAPTER XX—THE ORNAMENT AND THE HONOR OF FRANCE 175

CHAPTER XXI—THE TIGER OF THE ALPS 184

CHAPTER XXII—THE MONASTERY OF ST. BERNARD 191

CHAPTER XXIII—ST. PETER’S 202

CHAPTER XXIV—AUGUST 24th, IN THE YEAR 79 211

CHAPTER XXV—THE CITY THAT ROSE FROM THE DEAD 217

CHAPTER XXVI—THE MAGIC GROTTO 224

CHAPTER XXVII—ATHENA’S TEMPLE 230

CHAPTER XXVIII—NO WOMAN’S LAND 238

CHAPTER XXIX—THE HEART OF RUSSIA 250

CHAPTER XXX—THE MOTHER OF CHURCHES 261

PROPER NAMES PRONOUNCED 275

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 277

INTRODUCTION

Dear reader:

When I was a boy in school my favorite subject was geography, and my prize possession my geography book. This book was filled with pictures of the world’s most wonderful cities and mountains and temples, and had big maps to show where they were. I loved that book because it carried me away to all the strange and romantic lands. I read about the Egyptian Pyramids, and India’s marble towers, about the great cathedrals of France, and the ruins of ancient Babylon. The stories of such things always set me to dreaming, to yearning for the actual sight and touch of these world wonders.

Sometimes I pretended I had a magic carpet, and without bothering about tickets and money and farewells, I’d skyrocket away to New York or to Rome, to the Grand Canyon or to China, across deserts and oceans and mountains...then suddenly come back home when the school bell rang for recess.

I often said to myself: "I wish my father, or somebody, would take me to all these wonderful places. What good are they if you can’t see them? If I ever grow up and have a son, we are going traveling together. I’ll show him Gibraltar and Jerusalem, the Andes and the Alps, because I’ll want my boy not only to study geography—I’d like for him to live it, too."

Well, I’m grown up now. But as yet I haven’t any son or any daughter to go traveling with me. And so, in their places, may I take you?

Your friend,

THE OCCIDENT

CHAPTER I—A MARVELOUS BRIDGE

Where shall we start?

I’m writing this book in a house on the top of a high hill in San Francisco. From my window I can see the two biggest bridges in the world—one red, one silver—stretching across the beautiful bay below. Why not start right here, on our journey across the world in quest of its marvels? For surely these bridges are among the most marvelous achievements in human history.

The silver bridge leads eastward across the bay to link San Francisco with the cities on the opposite shore. The bay here is five miles wide. But to this five miles of bridge over the water, the approaches over the land at both ends add another three. So from end to end this giant among bridges measures eight miles long. This is four times the length of the famous George Washington Bridge across the Hudson River at New York (which, previously, was the greatest in the world), and seven times the length of the historic Brooklyn Bridge.

Have you ever walked eight miles? Were you tired? How long did it take? Unless you walked very fast it took perhaps three hours. Now imagine walking and walking and walking for three hours—all on the same enormous bridge. And for three of the miles the roadway is two hundred feet and more above the water. If you have a sixteen-story skyscraper in your town, and if you have been on the roof and looked over the edge, you will know how far the roadway is above the waves.

As you will see from a look at the picture, this Bay Bridge is made in two sections not at all alike. One section leads from San Francisco to a small island in the middle of the harbor, while the second section leads from the island to the eastern shore. The roadway of the first half is held up by two great steel cables which have been stretched out over the tops of steel towers that reach as high as fifty-story buildings. These cables are just like sagging tight-ropes on which you’ve seen circus acrobats dance—only a thousand times bigger. Hanging straight down from these tight-ropes are hundreds of smaller ropes, also of steel. And from the down-hanging ends of these, the roadway is suspended, high in the air. This road is a double-decker, one level above for automobiles, and one below for trains and trucks.

The second section, leading from the island to the eastern shore, mostly over shallow water, is built like an ordinary steel railroad bridge.

You would think that such a colossal framework, weighing thousands and thousands of tons, would be stiff and too firm to be moved. But this is not true—especially of the suspension part. Here, the monster cables, steel though they are, swing in the breeze like any other rope. If we cross this part of the bridge during a high wind, we can feel the roadway, crowded with trucks and automobiles and electric trains, very gently rising and falling.

So huge is this bridge, and so wide the bay it spans, engineers say it may remain the biggest in the world for a thousand years to come, for no larger body of water exists where the traffic is likely, within that time, to make necessary a greater effort.

Now that I’ve told you about the Bay Bridge, we shall cross over it ourselves. We’ll have to go by automobile, as eight miles would take too long to walk. The sloping approach itself is over a mile in length, because it has to climb from the streets of San Francisco to the bridge floor, two hundred feet above.

We start up. Our rising concrete road soars above great warehouses and docks and churches. Now we’re higher than most of the skyscrapers and can look down upon them. How tiny the people appear to be on the streets below!

Now we’re on the bridge itself, and over the Bay. White ferry boats sail far below us, and a big freight boat. If we had an apple we could toss it down the freighter’s smoke-stack to the stokers.

Notice the steel cables, side by side, from which our roadway hangs. Each one is over two feet thick (Can you imagine a steel rope two feet thick?), and contains seventeen thousand strands of wire. Each wire is as big as a pencil and will lift our automobile and all of us in it, and not break. Just one foot-length of these big cables weighs two thousand pounds. But they have to be strong, for they must hold up millions and millions of pounds. At a crowded hour there may be as many as three thousand automobiles, five hundred trucks, and two dozen electric trains, all rushing across the suspended part of the bridge at once, and all weighing down the two cables. Yet all this traffic put together does not weigh even one-tenth as much as the two steel and concrete roadways over which the traffic moves.

And now we have come to the first of the giant towers on the tops of which the cables rest, and through which our roadway runs. These towers, four in all, stand upon concrete piers that go down 240 feet below the surface of the water. These piers themselves are taller than the average New York office building.

Such a vast undertaking, where brave men had to work so far down in the water and so high above it, was not finished without a tragic loss of life. In all, twenty-four workmen were killed, some by dynamite explosions deep in the rock foundations, some by falling from the towers or the roadway into the bay. And every time a workman perished, all work was stopped for the rest of that day. So on twenty-four days, during the construction of the bridge, work stood still, as a sign of respect to the twenty-four victims.

One morning when the bridge was half completed I was being led across it by an engineer. Suddenly word began to pass along from workman to workman that one of their fellows had just fallen to his death. That makes the twentieth, somebody said. Without a word all the two thousand bridge-workers put down their tools, and walked in silent lines to the shore, and home.

We have now traveled two miles along this mighty swinging roadway, and come to what seems the end of it—to the far shore. But it’s not the far shore—we’re not yet in the middle of the bay. It’s a rocky island called Yerba Buena, and right through it, through the widest tunnel in the world, still nearly two hundred feet above the water, the double-decker roadway passes.

This isn’t a long tunnel, only about six hundred feet. But it’s so high and wide that a six-story building could be pulled through it and have room to spare. All this height is necessary because of the two decks—automobiles upstairs and trains downstairs.

In a burst of light we emerge from the tunnel and see ahead of us the second section of the bridge—a section even longer than the first. But it is not so interesting as the suspended part. It looks more like a railroad trestle made of steel girders. Slowly it runs downhill over the shallow water of the East Bay until it comes to the Oakland end, eight miles from the starting point in San Francisco.

Oakland is the city where the early pioneers left their covered wagons behind and climbed aboard sail-boat ferries for the trip across the bay. And this trip might take, with stubborn winds and tides to face, half a day. What would these pioneers think now if they could return and see this marvelous silver-colored bridge soaring far above them, and hear the whir of a thousand motor cars speeding across from Oakland to San Francisco in fifteen minutes?

CHAPTER II—THE GOLDEN GATE

Isn’t it remarkable that San Francisco should have not only the biggest bridge, but the two biggest bridges, in the world? And of the two, some people think that the shorter one—the red one—is the more wonderful. This one swings over the Golden Gate, the entrance to San Francisco Harbor, and so is called the Golden Gate Bridge.

It is likewise of the suspension type—hung on cables. But whereas the Bay Bridge is made of several spans linked together, the Golden Gate Bridge makes just one mighty leap across—one single span four-fifths of a mile long, a span almost twice as long as any single span on the Bay Bridge. Its towers, 750 feet high, are half again as high as the Bay Bridge towers. Beneath it the tides race in and out through the Golden Gate, and great Pacific liners pass, liners that are dwarfed by the shining steel web which seems to float as if by magic far above the tallest masts of the greatest ships.

On the other hand, the red bridge has only one roadway—for automobiles and trucks. There are no tracks for elevated trains.

And now we are going to visit this bridge, and see which of the two we think is the greater.

Just where the mile-wide gate is narrowest, a little peninsula juts out from the San Francisco shore. On this peninsula’s point, in 1854, the United States Army built a brick fort called Fort Winfield Scott, after the famous American general of that name. The guns of this fort were of the largest size ever made up to that time and could shoot all the way across the channel—over a mile—and prevent any hostile battleship from entering the harbor.

One of the army officers stationed in the fort in 1879 was a colonel named Sydney Taylor. His wife and his ten-year-old son, Sydney, Junior, lived there, too. One day little Sydney asked a gunner what that powder was which he packed into the muzzle of the big guns to fire them. The gunner, thinking it amusing to make fun of the little boy’s ignorance, said charcoal powder.

Straightway Sydney thought to himself: "If it’s only charcoal powder, perhaps I can fire the big guns." So he pounded up a big basketful of charcoal and, when nobody was looking, stuffed this grit into the mouth of the biggest gun and used a ramrod to pack it tight. Then he set a match to it and plugged his fingers into his ears to keep out what he thought was going to be a terrific explosion.

But the charcoal grit crammed into the gun wouldn’t even burn. Disgusted, Sydney left it as it was, and went off to some new adventure.

Then, a few days later, great excitement swept over the fort. A ship carrying Ulysses S. Grant was entering the Golden Gate. This was the world-famous General Grant who had led the northern armies to victory over the southern Confederacy, the General Grant to whom Robert E. Lee had surrendered, the General Grant who had twice been President of the United States, and was now on a triumphant trip around the world. He must be given a twenty-one-gun salute—and quickly—for his ship was sailing swiftly by, with the incoming tide.

The gunners prepared to man the biggest gun....

It was full of charcoal grit!

And by the time this grit had been cleaned out, and gunpowder put in, Grant’s ship had disappeared around the corner of the harbor.

The General’s companions were indignant, and all San Francisco ashamed, that the fort had failed to salute one of the greatest living American soldiers, and the most celebrated person who had, up to that time, ever come to California.

But why do I tell this story? I tell it because Sydney continued to grow up in that fort, gazing across the rushing waters of the Golden Gate, wondering if, someday, giants might build a bridge across it...how wonderful it would be...a bridge soaring from side to side!

But he not only dreamed—he planned and worked too. And, thanks in part to his vision and enthusiasm, the bridge was built, not by giants but by American engineers. And to Sydney Taylor went the office of traffic-master, the official who has control of all bridge traffic.

So now he speeds across his dream bridge and looks down, 240 feet, right on top of Fort Winfield Scott—for one section of the bridge arches protectingly over the old fort, deserted now but still standing. And there below he sees the rusty old cannon that once failed to greet Ulysses S. Grant.

And we, too, having climbed on foot along the sidewalk of the long winding ramp, can now look over the edge—down into the courtyard of the fort. Behind us on the shore are strewn the batteries and the barracks of the modern army post, and before us stretches the most