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Updated: May 12, 2025
The foraging duty of the past twenty-four hours had been work harassing and heavy, inglorious and full of fatigue. The country round was bare as a table-rock; the water-courses poor, choked with dust and stones, unfed as yet by the rains or snows of the approaching winter. The horses suffered sorely, the men scarce less.
We were standing on the surface of a flat table-rock, which jutted out from the face of the towering cliff and overhung the valley that was spread out like a map beneath us. About twenty feet back from the edge of the rock was a pile of debris heaped up against the face of the cliff; but the remaining surface of the stone was clean bare and weather-beaten.
From above a ray of light fell just upon the table-rock where they were gathered, making the waving spears glitter like the bayonet points of a body of troops, and forming a striking contrast with the dark cliffs and overshadowed water below, from which stragglers were quickly gathering, some paddling across the deep pool, others scrambling up the rocks, and all with the same fierce and restless expression.
A change has taken place I can scarcely describe in what respect; but it looks to me very different to what it did then." "Perhaps," I suggested, "the fall of that large portion of the table-rock has made the alteration you describe." "You have just hit it," he said; "I forgot the circumstance. The Horse-shoe is not so perfect as it was."
From the markings on the mountain side it was obvious that something of the sort had happened very recently, at any rate on this eastern face. That is, either the flat rock had sunk or the volcano had been thrown upwards. Once in the far past the cave had been as it was when we found it. Then it had gone down in such a way that the table-rock entirely sealed the entrance.
It is built upon the summit of a table-rock, with overhanging, eroded sides, 350 feet above the plain, which is 7,000 feet above the sea.
We had hardly held on our way for half an hour, before one of the loveliest valleys I have ever beheld opened at our feet; immense and lofty walls of rock, of the most varied and fantastic shapes, surrounded this fairy vale on all sides: in the foreground rose a gigantic table-rock, on which was built a beautiful village, with a church smiling in the midst.
Standing upon the table-rock that juts out at the foot of the fall so as to half-bridge over the lower-most eddy, I saw a small object topple over the summit of the cascade. It was nothing but a common pail or stable-bucket, as I perceived, when it glided past, almost within arm's length of me, and disappeared down the winding gorge.
The warlike group which struck us so forcibly had gathered rapidly from all parts of the pool upon a piece of flat table-rock that jutted out high up. Some unexplained excitement agitated the host; their innumerable spear-like antennæ moved ceaselessly.
Hitching the horses beneath a near shed, we roamed about looking how best to descend; until discovering a ladder planted against the face of the precipice, we took to this, and going down it about seventy feet, were landed upon a table-rock exactly on a level with the torrent, and at the very point whence it makes its down leap into a bay of the St.
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