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Still he met no one had seen no living being but Jean since quitting St. Florent at the other extremity of the island. It was freezingly cold at the summit of the pass where the road traverses a cleft in the mountain-range, and de Vasselot felt that weariness which comes to men, however strong, just before the dawn ends a sleepless night.
Its position, however, is picturesque standing on the bank of a romantic and finely-wooded Highland glen, and commanding a view on one side of a mountain-range, and on the other of a cultivated country, with its towns and villages in the distance.
The Servians have made a capital point in fixing their new boundary-line south of this mountain-range. Mountaineers are said to be "always freemen;" one can with equal truthfulness add that the costumes of mountaineers' wives and daughters are always more picturesque than those of their sisters in the valleys.
Lovely glens opened upon them, as they sailed along its southern coast, watered by clear streams from the southern mountain-range, and shaded by thick woods of pine and cedar, the latter of which are said to have in some cases attained a greater size even than those of the Lebanon. The range was also prolific of valuable metals.
This mountain-range has a most imposing appearance. White rocks and strata of white sand shine forth from its broad and generally barren expanse like fields of snow. The residence of the late Lady Hester Stanhope can be seen in the distance on the declivity of the mountain.
They passed now over many miles of the richly grassed slopes of a beautiful open forest, intersected by frequent watercourses where the land trended gradually upward to the distant mountain-range.
In climbing the heights, it was always a surprise to me to see the Pacific rise up as I rose, till it stood up like a great blue wall there against the horizon. A level plain unrolls in the same way as we mount above it, but it does not produce the same illusion of rising up like a wall or a mountain-range; the blue, facile water cheats the eye.
One pair of eyes does not suffice to take in this view; the objects are too numerous, and the spectator is at a loss whither he should first direct his gaze, upon the town, with its many ancient towers attached to the houses, giving them the air of knights' castles upon the numerous country-houses in the shade of luxurious mulberry plantations upon the beautiful valley between Beyrout and Mount Lebanon or on the distant mountain-range itself.
One fat old Turk, undertaking to explain it more fully, after the others have exhausted their knowledge of sign language, swells himself up like an inflated toad and imitates the labored respiration of a broken-winded horse in order to duly impress upon my mind the physical exertion I may expect to put forth in "riding"-he also paws the air with his right foot-over the mountain-range that looms up like an impassable barrier three miles east of the town.
It is a mountain-range of roofs, with ridges crossing, interlacing, and piled on one another, and upon which tall chimneys raise their peaks. It was but yesterday that they had an Alpine aspect to me, and I waited for the first snowstorm to see glaciers among them; to-day, I only see tiles and stone flues.
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