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Updated: September 27, 2025
The high-road curves round the lower slope of the mountains as round the base of a sugar-loaf, and is cut at times out of the sheer rock, while a little lower it is begirt by huge trees.
Outside the sugar-loaf hill, so marvellously channelled and cased with stalactite formation, has nothing remarkable it is a mere green height, and nothing more. Inside, however, as strange a spectacle meets our eyes as it is possible to conceive.
After a few miles the hitherto dead level of the valley is broken by low hills of reddish clay, and here the stone paths merge into well-beaten trails that on reasonably level soil afford excellent wheeling. The hillsides are crowded with graves, which, instead of the sugar-loaf "ant hillocks" of the paddy-fields, assume the traditional horseshoe shape of the Chinese ancestral grave.
On descending, we observed that the crucifixes had disappeared from the roads, and the broad-brimmed and sugar-loaf hats from the heads of the peasantry; the men wore hats contracted in the middle of the crown like an hour-glass, and the women caps edged with a broad band of black fur, the frescoes on the outside of the houses became less frequent; in short it was apparent that we had entered a different region, even if the custom-house and police officers on the frontier had not signified to us that we were now in the kingdom of Bavaria.
But we were agreeably disappointed to find that near us, in the middle of the sands, was a juniper swamp and pond of which the water was sweet and wholesome, though from the juniper roots it had the bright brown color of coffee. On the 11th the movement was made as planned. Hoke's outposts and pickets were driven from their rifle-pits, and his main line at Sugar-loaf well reconnoitred.
He still loved to take solitary walks, and many a quiet summer afternoon the familiar figure of the venerable churchwarden, in his seedy black cloak and sugar-loaf hat, might be seen wending its way along the banks of the River Spaaren to his favorite resort in the grove.
They started first, and we travel a little faster than they. Scarcely a blade of herbage cheered our sight to day. A sandy, gravelly hamadah, with a few rocks and sand-hills here and there, such is the nature of the country. The rocks now assume a conic form, ke ras suker, like a sugar-loaf, as the people say.
Now, it so happened that Zeppa was ascending the Sugar-loaf mountain on its other side, when all this cannonading was going on. He was naturally surprised at such unwonted sounds, and, remembering that cannon implied ships, and that ships were necessary to deliverance from his enforced exile, he naturally hastened his steps, and experienced an unusual degree of excitement.
I had not seen him since the battle of Shiloh and I looked at him with intense interest. He had on an old "sugar-loaf" hat, with limp, drooping brim, and his outer coat was the ordinary uniform coat, with a long cape, of a private in the cavalry. His foot-gear was cavalry boots, splashed with mud, and the ends of his trousers' legs were tucked inside the boots.
Yes, my boy, like yourself, I have been transferred from my old home, to this region, which is not more than two hundred miles from your present residence. The governor sent me to establish it soon after you left. I have named it the Mountain House, because there's a thing the shape and size of a sugar-loaf behind it. So, I'll hope to look you up during the winter.
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