United States or Kyrgyzstan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The signs of some impending disaster coming from the heights above were too strongly marked to be lightly disregarded; the idea of a volcanic convulsion, though by this time a long-distant and vague memory, became so terrifying to the dwellers on the mountain’s flanks and in Torre del Greco, Resina and the various towns that line the seaward base of the Mountain, that the majority of the people removed themselves and their property with all speed to places of safety.
How the heart rejoices in viewing this beautiful landscape! when the sky is serene, the air cool, and the sun just sunk behind the mountain’s top. The hayawa-tree perfumes the woods around; pairs of scarlet aras are continually crossing the river. The maam sends forth its plaintive note, the wren chants its evening song.
“to stand within the City Disinterred; And hear the autumnal leaves like light footfalls Of spirits passing through the streets; and hear The Mountain’s slumberous voice at intervals Thrill through those roofless halls.”
The ground gone over these two last days seems condemned to perpetual solitude and silence. There was not one four-footed animal to be seen, nor even the marks of one. It would have been as silent as midnight, and all as still and unmoved as a monument had not the jabiru in the marsh, and a few vultures soaring over the mountain’s top, shown that it was not quite deserted by animated nature.
We mounted them with desperate excitement, and at the summit halted, for we felt that there was space before our faces, and had been told that those stairs led to a mid mountain lake, nine hundred and sixty feet below the mountain’s top; two hundred and forty feet above its base.
They occupy three or four acres on the mountain’s side, and many of them are gnarled in a way that implies great age, but except these signs I saw nothing in their appearance or conduct that tended to prove them contemporaries of the cedars employed in Solomon’s Temple.
At times he would charge fiercely on detached parties of Arabs in the valleys or plains, and be off again to cover before the main force could come up. Long he defeated every effort of the Arab leader to bring on an open battle, but at length found himself cornered at Lorca, in a small valley at a mountain’s foot.
The trees on it, which look like islands on the ocean, add greatly to the beauty of the landscape; while the rivulet’s course is marked out by the æta-trees which follow its meanders. Not being able to pursue the direct course from hence to the next Indian habitation on account of the floods of water which fall at this time of the year, you take a circuit westerly along the mountain’s foot.
Word Of The Day