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Shores that curve in every line of beauty, holding out arm-like promontories, into whose embrace the tideless sea runs up; mountain-ranges whose tops in winter are covered with snow, and whose sides are draped with the luxuriant vegetation of the South; a large city rising in a series of semicircular terraces from the deep azure of the sea to the deep azure of the mountains, whose eastern architecture flushes to a vivid rosy hue in the afternoon light like some fabled city of the poets; and dominating the glorious horizon the double peak of Vesuvius forming the centre in which all the features of landscape loveliness are focussed crowned by its pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night.
The mountain-ranges are beneath your feet, and folded together: only the loftier summits look down here and there as on a second plain; lakes also lie clear and earnest in their solitude. No trace of man now visible; unless indeed it were he who fashioned that little visible link of Highway, here, as would seem, scaling the inaccessible, to unite Province with Province.
What was its object and what its destination are still mysteries; but it was probably directed toward the mountain-ranges in the southwestern portion of the Great Basin, of the topography of which region hitherto unvisited by Federal explorers the Mormons undoubtedly possess accurate information.
After eleven years of study and exploration in the Sierra Nevada of California and the mountain-ranges of the Great Basin, studying in particular their glaciers, forests, and wild life, above all their ancient glaciers and the influence they exerted in sculpturing the rocks over which they passed with tremendous pressure, making new landscapes, scenery, and beauty which so mysteriously influence every human being, and to some extent all life, I was anxious to gain some knowledge of the regions to the northward, about Puget Sound and Alaska.
The species is distributed all along the mountain-ranges of the Pacific Coast from Alaska to Mexico, and east to the Rocky Mountains. Nevertheless, it is as yet comparatively little known. Audubon and Wilson did not meet it. Swainson was, I believe, the first naturalist to describe a specimen from Mexico.
On the line, however, the trade-winds and monsoons appear very irregularly, because there are four seasons instead of two that is to say, two rainy and two dry and the weather is also subject to frequent changes of a local character, especially in the neighbourhood of mountain-ranges and volcanoes. With the exception of Borneo and the central part of Celebes all these islands are volcanic.
Finally, we have seen that in the extreme eastern point of Tierra del Fuego, the cleavage and coast-lines extend W. and E. and even W.S.W. and E.N.E.: over a large area westward, the cleavage, the main range of mountains, and some subordinate ranges, but not the outlines of the coast, strike W.N.W., and E.S.E.: in the central and western parts of the St. of Magellan, the stratification, the mountain-ranges, the outlines of the coast, and the cleavage all strike nearly N.W. and S.E. North of the strait, the outline of the coast, and the mountains on the mainland, run nearly north and south.
But, after having surmounted this barrier, the prospect which then opens may be regarded as a miniature picture of those more lofty mountain-ranges which are to be found in other parts of the island.
Next to this, the discovery of a connection between South Victoria Land and, probably, King Edward VII. Land through their continuation in huge mountain-ranges, which run to the south-east and were seen as far south as lat. 88° 8', but which in all probability are continued right across the Antarctic Continent.
With a mad imprecision of timing, mountain-ranges plummeted out of the sky at utterly unpredictable times and places. Anywhere on Earth, at night-time, living creatures might look upward and see the stars blotted out in irregularly-shaped, swiftly enlarging areas which would grow until there was only blackness overhead. But that could not last.
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