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These scarps have been ploughed by the weather in long horizontal furrows, so that they lean over as though desirous of contemplating their dirty faces in the limpid water. Out of their clefts spring evergreen oaks, juniper, box and sloe-bushes.
Where the veils had stretched between the perpendicular pillars of the cliffs was now a wide and ragged-edged opening. The roadway which had run so smoothly through the scarps was blocked by a thousand foot barrier. Over it, beyond it, I could see through the crystalline clarity of the air the opposing walls. "We can climb it," Ventnor said. We passed on and reached the base of the barrier.
On one bank of that loquacious water a footpath descended a green dell. Here it was rocky and stony, and lay on the steep scarps of the ravine; here it was choked with brambles; and there, in fairy haughs, it lay for a few paces evenly on the green turf. Like a sponge, the hillside oozed with well-water.
Opposite Mpwapwa, at the distance of thirty miles or so, rises the Anak peak of Rubeho, with several other ambitious and tall brethren cresting long lines of rectilinear scarps, which ascend from the plain of Ugombo and Marenga Mkali as regularly as if they had been chiselled out by the hands of generations of masons and stonecutters.
Beyond, towards the sea, the slopes and scarps that had been muffled with a thick robe of cliff herbage, were showing their chill grey substance through the withered verdure, like the background of velvet whence the pile has been fretted away.
The latter, with their towering scarps, their massive enceintes, their "portentous ditches," will remain as monuments of a vicious system, except where, as in the cases of Vienna, Cologne, Sedan, etc., the dwellers in the cities they encircle shall procure their demolition for the sake of elbow-room, or until modern howitzer shells or missiles charged with high explosives shall pulverise their naked expanses of masonry.
So the suggestion lapsed, and the Scarps worried along on William's salary for a time, and then moved to Philadelphia. What Addie's experiences were there, or in Cincinnati and Indianapolis, to which cities they also wandered, I have no means of knowing, nor did the John Clarks hear from her, except for a rare penciled postcard. The Clarks, as may be observed, were no great letter-writers.
Finding that he was uninjured, he first of all viewed the crater at closer quarters, and then started to walk painfully toward the northern shore. When he had attained the crest above the lake, the landscape sloped gently down for two miles to the sea. Everywhere he passed through traces of his rough work. The country was carved into scarps, grooves, channels, and craters.
We gaze and gaze in spite of the vast height from which we contemplate it; and when at last we tear ourselves away from the engaging scene, we are in a region all ruggedness and sublimity, on either side rocky scarps and gloomy forests, with reminders by the wayside that we are approaching an Alpine flora. Nothing can be wilder or more solitary than the scene.
The cliffs drop down quite perpendicularly for 200 feet, and the remaining distance to the bed of the stream is a rough slope, quite bare in places, and in others densely grown over with trees; but on every side the fortress-like scarps are as stern and bare as any that face the ocean. Looking north or south the gorge seems completely shut in.
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