United States or Afghanistan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


The road continued by the boisterous rapids, hemmed in on the other hand by woods and threatening mountain-walls. The thunder of the waters prevented continuous conversation: we therefore admired in silence the grandeur of the scene and the magnificent glimpses which slight curves in the road afforded ever and anon of neighboring mountain-peaks and wooded valleys below.

But one day, at Muoniovara, as I sat before the fire in the afternoon darkness, there flashed across my mind a vision of cloudless Egypt trees rustling in the hot wind, yellow mountain-walls rising beyond the emerald plain of the Nile, the white pencils of minarets in the distance, the creamy odour of bean-blossoms in the air a world of glorious vitality, where Death seemed an unaccountable accident.

It was a little cluster of houses at the head of a bay or inlet of the sea, where the lovely transparent water was green as grass, and stood in the opening of a valley enclosed by high, steep mountain-walls, with sharp ridges down their sides clothed with rich forests. All around us grew delicate, luxuriant ferns, of which there are one hundred and fifty varieties in the islands.

He felt that he was diving, and had the thought that there was but water enough to moisten his red hands when his senses left him. The old city of Meran faces Southward to the yellow hills of Italy, across a broad vale, between two mountain-walls and torrent-waters.

Some, in the shape of huge granite slabs, formed a rude, continuous broadway; others, scarred and furrowed, but softened and beautified by golden and silver lichen, torn by storms and snow from the cyclopean mountain-walls, were scattered topsy-turvy on either hand; many had become lodged in the river, where they carried on a steady defence against the tumultuous Giessbach, which, having its rise in mountains ten thousand feet high, leapt, foaming milky white, over and between them, forming a long series of bold cascades for a distance of half a dozen miles.

From the two opposing mountain-walls singular, thin, knife-blade ridges of stone jutted out, dividing the sides of the gulf into a series of amphitheatres, each one a labyrinth of ice and rock. Piercing thick beds of snow, sprang up knobs and straight isolated spires of rock, mere obelisks curiously carved by frost, their rigid slender forms casting a blue, sharp shadow upon the snow.

Stay under that dark palm-tree through the night, Rest on the mountain slope, By the couching antelope, O thou enthroned supremacy of light! And for ever the lustre thou art lending Lean on the fair long brook that leaps and leaps, Silvery leaps and falls: Hang by the mountain-walls, Moon! and arise no more to crown the steeps, For a danger and dolour is thy wending!

Dotted here and there were the shining points and ridges of light marking the peaks and crater-walls which the rays of the rising sun had already touched. Before them and to the right and left rose a vast maze of ragged, splintery peaks and huge ramparts of mountain-walls enclosing plains so far below their summits that the light of neither sun nor earth ever reached them.

The Belt Mountain region near Great Falls is a wonder-land, like the Garden of the Gods in Colorado, or the Goblin Land near the Yellowstone. It would seem that it ought to be made a State park. Here one fancies one's self to be amid the ruins of castles, cathedrals, and fortresses, so fantastic are the shapes of the broken mountain-walls.

Huge mountain-walls, towering to immense heights and enclosing great circular and oval plains, one side of them blazing with intolerable light, and the other side black with impenetrable obscurity; enormous valleys reaching down from brilliant day into rayless night perhaps down into the very bowels of the dead world itself; vast grey-white plains lying round the mountains, crossed by little ridges and by long black lines, which could only be immense fissures with perpendicular sides but all hard, grey-white and black, all intolerable brightness or inky gloom; not a sign of life anywhere; no shady forests, no green fields, no broad, glittering oceans; only a ghastly wilderness of dead mountains and dead plains.