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I never thought I should see a volcano, but the idea of these tempestuous mountains, seething with red-hot fire inside, and ready to vomit forth flames and lava at any time appealed to the imagination. This lava, it seemed, was a kind of thick treacly stuff, resembling pitch, which ran down the mountain-sides boiling hot and carried red ruin in its track.
I remember that trip through the mountains in that soft, hazy, beautiful August weather; the mountain-tops, white with snow, were wrapped about with purple mist which twisted and shifted as if never satisfied with their draping. The sheer rocks in the mountain-sides, washed by a recent rain, were streaked with dull reds and blues and yellows, like the old-fashioned rag carpet.
The raindrops fall thick and heavy, and a thunderstorm bursts. But the fury is soon spent, and the clouds clear away. The shepherds are astir, and from the mountain-sides come the peculiar notes of the "Ranz des Vaches" from their pipes. Suddenly all is changed again.
They cool their Wine with Snow, which they get out of pits dug in the Mountain-sides. Near here, too, is a Burning Mountain they call Vesuvio. It may be mighty curious, but 'tis as great a Nuisance and Perpetual Alarm to the peaceable Inhabitants of Naples as a Powder Magazine.
For twenty-two days the hardy adventurers advanced through a forest, dense with thickets and tangled swamps and interlacing vines so thick that for days the sun could not be seen and over rough and slippery mountain-sides until they came to an open sea stretching off to the south and west. Balboa called it the South Sea, but it is usually called the Pacific Ocean, the name given it afterward.
Walter Scott belongs to all Scotland. He was, no man more, a lover of the woods and fields, of mountain-sides and pastoral braes, of the river and forest, Ettrick and Tweed and Yarrow, and Perthshire that princely district, half Highland, half Lowland and the chain of silvery lochs that pierce the mountain shadows through Stirling and Argyle: every league of the fair country he loved.
He had not been courageous; he had never tried to put any other thoughts in the place of the dark ones. He had wandered by blue lakes and thought them; he had lain on mountain-sides with sheets of deep blue gentians blooming all about him and flower breaths filling all the air and he had thought them.
Schnapps is good when rheumatism works in the bones: there is then no better lotion; and a thimbleful of cheerfulness in the morning, and another of sleep at night, are what I wish for our wirth, myself and every peasant daily; but why need they pull up all the gentians, which were bits of heaven scattered over the mountain-sides?
Bold, grey cliffs shoot up here through a mass of verdure and of foliage, and there white cottages, perched in seemingly inaccessible positions, glisten in the sun on the colored mountain-sides.
Every few yards discovered some new species, filling the mind with delight at their beauty and variety. In dryer and more stony places, a pinnatifid club-moss stood up amongst the stones in crisp tufts, like the parsley fern on mountain-sides at home. After a steep and rocky ascent, we reached the top of the range, and before us lay the upper end of the valley of Jinotega.
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