Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: October 6, 2025
The most interesting part of the very varied scenery of this river is not the castles, the antique towns, the dense woods or the teeming vineyards lining rocks where a chamois could hardly stand all this it has in common with the Rhine but the volcanic region of the Eifel, the lakes in ancient craters, the tossed masses of lava and tufa, the great wastes strewn with dark boulders, the rifts that are called valleys and are like the Iceland gorges, the poor, starved villages and the extraordinary rusticity, not to say coarseness, of the inhabitants.
As might be expected, the memories of childhood left the most lasting effect upon her. The Eifel, that bleak plateau between the Moselle and the Rhine, with its broad melancholy heaths and bald craters of extinct volcanoes, with its dark lakes and lonely forests, is the district with which she is most familiar.
And far beyond it all sleeps, high in air, the Eifel with its hundred crater peaks; blue mound behind blue mound, melting into white haze.
Numerous similar examples are to be observed in the Auvergne region of Central France and the Eifel. And here we find remarkable cases of "breached cones," or craters, which will require some special description.
We thus early begin to find proofs of the general uniformity of organic life over the surface of the earth, at the time when each particular system of rocks was formed. Species identical with the remains in the Wenlock limestone occur in the corresponding class of rocks in the Eifel, and partially in the Harz, Norway, Russia, and Brittany.
I foresee, however, a new battle of Waterloo between you and my friend Ehrenberg, who accompanied me lately, just after the Victoria festivals, to the volcanoes of the Eifel with Dechen. Not an inch of ground without infusoria in those regions! For Heaven's sake do not meddle with the infusoria before you have seen the Canada Lakes and completed your journey.
On the same day, in some parts of the Eifel, a great wheel was made of straw and dragged by three horses to the top of the hill. Thither the village boys marched at nightfall, set fire to the wheel, and sent it rolling down the slope. At Oberstattfeld the wheel had to be provided by the young man who was last married. About Echternach in Luxemburg the same ceremony is called "burning the witch."
The novel John Miller treats the tragedy of a rich man of the Eifel who goes to ruin in pride and blind presumption; The Cross in the Venn deals with the religious life of this district.
How many of the Americans who have been thus impressed by French enterprise, have realized that in their own country there is a natural gorge, at points of which the distance between the summit and the base is more than five times as great as the height of the Eifel Tower?"
In olden times the Rhine flowed into a deep mighty lake above the town of Königswinter. Those who then lived near the Eifel Mountains or on the heights of the Westerwald, were in constant fear of these swelling waters which often overflowed, causing great destruction in the country.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking