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Updated: July 15, 2025
The sun shone upon the mass of cloud, and wind chased the misty shadows amongst the mountains. All around, in an immense circle, glaciers and snow-clad mountain-peaks gleamed forth from amongst the clouds. Before me rose a lofty mountain, shaped like a cupola, the top of which was covered with a black cloud, whilst the lower part was lighted up by bright sunshine. It was the peak of the Simplon.
And that minute commenced our journey across Turkey, Bulgaria, Servia, Bosnia, Croatia, to Trieste, occupying no day or two as in old times, but four months, a long-drawn nightmare, though a nightmare of rich happiness, if one may say so, leaving on the memory a vague vast impression of monstrous ravines, ever-succeeding profundities, heights and greatnesses, jungles strange as some moon-struck poet's fantasy, everlasting glooms, and a sound of mighty unseen rivers, cataracts, and slow cumbered rills whose bulrushes never see the sun, with largesse everywhere, secrecies, profusions, the unimaginable, the unspeakable, a savagery most lush and fierce and gaudy, and vales of Arcadie, and remote mountain-peaks, and tarns shy as old-buried treasure, and glaciers, and we two human folk pretty small and drowned and lost in all that amplitude, yet moving always through it.
At times, at the pitch of a rapid shelving, that was like a fall, her heart went down; and at the next throb exalted before it rose, not reasoning why; her confidence was in him; she was his comrade whatever chanced. Up over the mountain-peaks she had known edged moments, little heeded in their passage, when life is poised as a crystal pitcher on the head, in peril of a step.
And this great plain was now rearranging itself in a widespread drama of havoc, withdrawing in ravines like mutual backing curtsies, then surging to clap together in passionate mountain-peaks, else jostling like the Symplegades, fluent and inconstant as billows of the sea, grinding itself, piling itself, pouring itself in cataracts of powdered ice, while here and there I saw the meteor-stones leap spasmodically, in dusts and heaps, like geysers or spurting froths in a steamer's wake, a tremendous uproar, meantime, filling all the air.
Both the foreground and the mountain-peaks have an uncomfortable barren air. At ten o'clock we entered the harbour of Larnaka. The situation of this town is any thing but fine; the country looks like an Arabian desert, and a few unfruitful date- palms rise beside the roofless stone houses.
And Siegfried made each one swear to serve him faithfully; and then he sent them back to the snow-covered mountain-peaks to stand again as watchmen at their posts. And now another danger appeared.
But that unruly Athens, where fools decided the gravest questions of polity and right and wrong, where it was not safe to be just, and where property, which you had garnered up by the thrift and industry of to-day, might be wrung from you by the caprices of the mob to-morrow, that very Athens probably secured the greatest human happiness and nobleness of its era, invented art, and sounded for us the depths of philosophy: God lent to it the noblest intellects, and it flashes to-day the torch that gilds yet the mountain-peaks of civilization."
When the sky has long shone with unclouded splendor, and the air is so wonderfully clear that even the most distant mountain-peaks are distinctly visible, rain is not long delayed; and who can laugh heartily a long time without finally shedding tears like a mourner?
For a long time he could not recall a single event in his history and when at last some of the most prominent began to re-present themselves to his view it was vaguely and slowly, as mountain-peaks and hill-tops break through a morning mist. This was not the only result of the blow which his rival had struck him; it had left him totally blind.
Out in the solitudes Nature speaks with her many-toned voices, and they are deaf. They have a blind sensational enjoyment, such as a squirrel or a chicken may have, but they can in no wise interpret the Mighty Mother, nor even hear her words. The ocean moans his secret to unheeding ears. The agony of the underworld finds no speech in the mountain-peaks, bare and grand.
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