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Updated: June 22, 2025
The setting sun had just broken through after a misty day, the mountains were illumined with purple and rose-madder, and snow-tipped against the blue sky, a wonderful wistaria blue drifted smoke-like about the valley; and the tall trees poplars and cypresses stood like spires.
Indeed the country was on a slope which appeared to terminate at a mass of snow-tipped mountains, for which we were steering, and where we learnt the second lake of which the wanderer had spoken as the lake without a bottom was situated.
"I was but a lad and my party took me along only because I had a knack at cooking and was willing to do anything in order to see the place where such wonderful fortunes were made. It was a hot summer afternoon when, crossing a region of low, thinly wooded hills, we looked down upon American River; away to the east were high mountain ranges, their peaks, although it was still August, snow-tipped.
Day by day something had worn away that lure, as the ceaseless grind of water wears away rock, and for two weeks he wandered slowly and without purpose in the green valleys that lay under the snow-tipped peaks of the ranges. He was gripped in the agony of an unutterable loneliness, which fell upon and scourged him like a disease.
My eyes involuntarily filled with tears, and I stood completely lost in wonder and admiration. It was early morning. The sun had newly risen, though not yet visible, and threw a flood of rosy light upon the gigantic snow-tipped pinnacles, causing them to glisten like polished white marble.
There is a rock here and a big green cave of water there; there is a tumultuous rising and sinking and sinking of snow-tipped waves; there are places that are smooth-running for a moment and then yawn and open up into great gurgling chasms the next; there are strange whirls and backward eddies and rocks, rough and smooth and polished and through all this the canoe glances like an arrow, dips like a wild bird down the wing of the storm, now slanting from a rock, now edging a green cavern, now breaking through a backward rolling billow, without a word spoken, but with every now and again a quick convulsive twist and turn of the bow-paddle to edge far off some rock, to put her full through some boiling billow, to hold her steady down the slope of some thundering chute which has the power of a thousand horses: for remember, this river of rapids, this Winnipeg, is no mountain torrent, no brawling brook, but over every rocky ledge and "wave-worn precipice" there rushes twice a vaster volume than Rhine itself pours forth.
There were long, green ridges now, swelling from the plain and breaking away into little rocky cliffs tufted with wild fig trees: sluggish streams wound down from the east where, far away, loomed the snow-tipped summits of Apennine, while toward the west the sky reflected a brighter light from the sea that glittered beneath it.
Once more we gaze delighted upon lovely valleys, dark shadowy gorges, far-reaching plains of cacti and yucca palms, bordered by lofty, snow-tipped mountains; we see again the exuberant fruitfulness of the tropics, and the loveliness of the floral kingdom in this land of the sun; once more we stroll through the dimly lighted aisles of grand cathedrals, listening to the solemn chant of human voices, and the organ's deep reverberating tones; or view again the suggestive ruins of a vanished race.
I saw upon the terrace before me several men strolling, smoking cigarettes, and with them their fair partners wrapped in rich cloaks and furs. They had come out after supper to admire the wonderful moonlit scene, for before them rose the snow-tipped mountains in a long serrated range, the high Apennines which divide the Adriatic from the Mediterranean.
All the gipsies and our Zeitoonli and Rustum Khan's lean servant joined in the refrains, so that we trotted along under the snow-tipped fangs of the Kara Dagh oblivious of the passage of time, but very keenly conscious of touch with a realm of life whose existence hitherto we had only vaguely guessed at.
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