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The books we had with us gave no information on the subject, and I could not ask the natives through my ignorance of their language. By three o'clock in the afternoon we were once more on board, and an hour afterwards we sailed out into the open sea. To-day we saw nothing further, except a high and lengthened mountain-range on the Asiatic mainland. It was a branch of the Taurus.
The restless foot of the pioneer has reached and climbed the mountains. He pauses but a moment to gaze at the valley and presses forward. The valley reached and he must cross the river, and now the unbounded expanse of the plain spreads before him. Traversing this after many weary days he stands beneath a mightier mountain-range towering above him. Up! up!
These stopping places are all summer-resorts, where the guests, snugly housed at the base of the mountain-range, divide the time between lounging or rambling under the shadow of the tall pines and angling for the famous Tahoe trout in the brightness of the open Lake.
It has been already noticed that Rhages gave name to a district; and this district maybe certainly identified with the long narrow tract of fertile territory intervening between the Elburz mountain-range and the desert, from about Kasvin to Khaar, or from long. 30° to 52° 30'. The exact site of the city of Rhages within this territory is somewhat doubtful.
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.
Cradled in the heart of a great mountain-range, it pursued its gleaming way, here lying silent in glassy lakes, there rushing into tinkling little falls, foaming great falls, and thundering cataracts. Scores of bridges spanned its width, but no steamers flurried its crystal depths. Here and there a rough little rowboat, tethered to a willow, rocked to and fro in some quiet bend of the shore.
The avenues and streets of a city somewhat resemble the main and tributary valleys of a mountain-range, and the task of campaigning in Paris was less unlike that of manoeuvering in the narrow gorges of the Apennines than might be supposed; at least Buonaparte's strategy was nearly identical for both. All his measures were masterly.
The inhabitants lived in communities ruled by local caciques, and the country was divided into five principal regions, each under an absolute chief cacique, as follows: Magua, signifying "watered plain," the northeastern part of the island and comprising most of what is to-day known as the Cibao that part of the Dominican Republic lying north of the central mountain-range.
It is only by reflecting on such cases as that of the gravel beds of Patagonia, covering so many thousand square leagues of surface, and which, if heaped into a ridge, would form a mountain-range almost equal to the Cordillera, that the amount of denudation becomes credible.
Behind, on the north and east, is the high mountain-range, along whose base we have been travelling; the whole range is covered with trees, which appear even on the prominent peaks, Chiarapela, Morindi, and Chiava; at this last the chain bends away to the N.W., and we could see the distant mountains where the chief, Semalembue, gained all our hearts in 1856.
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