Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
here, the river was so clear that I could see the bottom, and the
shadows of the fish which passed over it like unformed thoughts.
As we emerged from the gorge I noticed a creature unlike anything
I had seen before. Sickly grey with large black spots, a big head with
a hooked jaw, the cold yellow eyes of a wolf, as long and lean as a
pike, it continued, unafraid of us, to patrol the bank, hunting. It was
a huchen , the predatory landlocked salmon of the Danube catchment.
At three or four pounds this one was still an infant; some reach sixty.
The rivers further north, which drain into the Adriatic, also contain
monsters. The marbled trout which inhabit them, like the huchen ,
grow to sixty pounds. A fisherman I spoke to on the banks of the
River Soˇca told me that sometimes when he had hooked a grayling
and was bringing it to the net, a monstrous trout would loom out
from behind a boulder, snatch it off the hook and swallow it whole.
As the forests of Slovenia had recovered, so had the rivers. The soil
was bound up by the roots of the trees and could no longer be stripped
from the land, so they now ran clear. They were contaminated by
neither pesticides nor fertilizers, and, because the woods slowly
released the water that fell on them, they did not suffer the worst
extremes of flood or drought.
Tomaž Hartmann drove for almost an hour along a forest track
through Kocevski Rog. The woods of beech and silver ir towered
over us, in places almost touching across the road. Their roots
sprawled over mossy boulders. They rolled down into limestone sink-
holes: karstic craters. Karst topography  - weathered limestone
landscapes of chasms and caves, sinkholes, shafts and pavements - is
named after this region of Slovenia, which is sometimes called the
Kras or Karst plateau. The word means barren land. When Karst
landscapes are grazed they are rapidly denuded, but it was hard to
connect the term with what I now saw.
Where the road clung to the edge of a hill, I could see for many
miles across the Dinaric Mountains. The view was framed by the tops
of the trees beneath us, through which the sunlight filtered. The moun-
tains rambled across the former Yugoslavia, fading into ever fainter
susurrations of blue. The entire range was furred with forest. Where
the road sank into a pass, the darkness closed around us. Through the
Search WWH ::




Custom Search