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But up from the narrow fertile strip of river bank towered on either hand barren mountains, their precipitous granite sides gashed here and there by deep gorges in and out of which the trail wound with sharp turns and steep descents. The grey, forbidding mountains, showing hardly a foothold for man or beast, tree or house, matched the grey, swirling river, here unnavigable even for rafts.

"Almost as charming as at the Opera," thought Blondet, making his way along the banks of the unnavigable portion of the Avonne, whose caprices contrast with the straight and deep and silent stream of the lower river, flowing between the tall trees of the forest of Les Aigues.

His words are worth setting down: 'The Asian and American continents, if they be not fully joined, yet seem they to come very neere, from whose high and snow-covered mountains, the north and north-west winds send abroad their frozen nimphes to the infecting of the whole air hence comes it that in the middest of their summer, the snow hardly departeth from these hills at all; hence come those thicke mists and most stinking fogges, ... for these reasons we coniecture that either there is no passage at all through these Northerne coasts, which is most likely, or if there be, that it is unnavigable.

The second empties into the harbor, about two miles southward of of the highest land bordering it, called Bain Point. The third, a mile-and-a-half further westward, both small and unnavigable, and the fourth known as, STANLEY OR TE-KA RIVER, into its most south-western bay.

The blue lake was about the only part true to nature; and even that should have had a foot-note to state that it was generally lashed into high, unnavigable waves, by a chronic nor'-wester. No: there was nothing for it but to go home again to the little run which had seemed such a mere paddock in our eyes, whilst we indulged in castle-building over 100,000 acres of country.

During the rains, the scene must indeed be extraordinary, when the Cosi lays many miles of land under water, and pours so vast a quantity of detritus into the bed of the Ganges that long islets are heaped up and swept away in a few hours; and the latter river becomes all but unnavigable.

And because Fairbanks was enterprising and far-sighted, while Chena was avaricious and narrow, because Fairbanks offered free sites and Chena charged enormously for water-front, business went the ten miles up the often unnavigable slough and settled there, and by and by built a little railway that it might be independent of the uncertain boat service.

How to make the homeward journey had now become a serious question. The weather had made the sea unnavigable; and the Alps, now covered to a great depth with ice and snow, could be crossed only on sledges. I resolved on going by land to Leghorn, a wearisome and expensive route, but one that would show me the old Etruria, with several cities of note in Italian history.

The Snake River, a sluggish, unnavigable stream, coming from the back-lying hills and through the tundra, empties into the sea where the town tapers off at the north, and thereby forms a sand-spit. The first impressions after landing were those of confusion, waste, and filth.

On the north-west similar ranges of hills form a barrier between Burma and the frontier provinces of India, and when I tell you that all these mountains are densely covered with forest and jungle, and that the rivers are wide, and in many cases unnavigable, you will understand how it is that Burma is not better known, and that so few people undertake the arduous work of exploring its interior.