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About thirty-five miles from Santiago harbor, as one sails eastward, the wall-like mesa on the left sinks from a height of two or three hundred feet to a height of only twenty or thirty; the mountains of the Sierra del Cobre come to an end or recede from the coast, leaving only a few insignificant hills; and through a blue, tremulous heat-haze one looks far inland over the broad, shallow valley of the Guantanamo River.
I expected, or rather dreaded, to find the great wall-like piano-case shutting up the whole space I had opened. Certainly, the huge case was there for I at once laid my hand upon it but I could scarce restrain an exclamation of joy, when I found that it extended scarce half-way across the opening!
Suddenly it flashed into Jack's mind that in former times, before the bridge had been built, there had been a ford at the point. The banks, steep elsewhere, almost wall-like in fact, were still graded at the place where the old crossing spot had been. He jerked over the steering wheel with a suddenness that threatened to overturn the Wondership.
I was "it" for anchor watch, and, as is often the case, the anchor watch manned the running small boat. We visited several vessels of the fleet, the crew staying in the boat while the officers went aboard. When we finally started to return to our own ship, we carried two of our officers, Mr. Duncan, Mr. Barnard, and an officer from the "Indiana." As we cleared the wall-like sides of the "St.
Many of those masses rose above the sea more than two hundred feet perpendicularly, and showed wall-like surfaces of half a league in length. At the point where the schooners happened to be just at that moment, the ice-islands were not so large, but quite as high, and consequently were more easily agitated.
It had a rolling surface and was coated with a carpet of dusty sand, except in the northwest corner. The northern end of the mesa, Ned could see, widened and ended in a sharp rise almost wall-like in form. At the western end this wall-like elevation turned the corner and extended south a short distance, finally dropping down to the general level of the mesa.
It rambles up and down along the side of the hills as a road did once on the beautiful Cornice along the Ligurian Riviera midway between the upper hill crest and the sea, having on the right the mountains, a succession of wall-like, perpendicular, hoary cliffs, between 1,500 feet and 2,000 feet high, a great wall riven into every variety of fantastic shapes of bastions, towers, and pyramids, all bare and rugged, crumbling here and there into huge boulders, strewn along the slopes down to the road, across the road, and further down to the water-edge, a scene which might befit the battle-field of the Titans against the gods; and on the left the wide expanse of the waters, with a coast like a fringe of little glens and creeks and headlines, and the sun's glitter on the waves like Dante's "tremolar della marina" on the shore of Purgatory.
The rough and unfinished appearance of this wall-like heap of stones was heightened by the quantity of large and small pieces of granite which were piled on the top of it, and which had been collected by the anchorites, in case of an incursion, to roll and hurl down on the invading robbers.
The features in the scenery of the Andes which struck me most, as contrasted with the other mountain chains with which I am acquainted, were, the flat fringes sometimes expanding into narrow plains on each side of the valleys, the bright colours, chiefly red and purple, of the utterly bare and precipitous hills of porphyry, the grand and continuous wall-like dikes, the plainly-divided strata which, where nearly vertical, formed the picturesque and wild central pinnacles, but where less inclined, composed the great massive mountains on the outskirts of the range, and lastly, the smooth conical piles of fine and brightly coloured detritus, which sloped up at a high angle from the base of the mountains, sometimes to a height of more than 2000 feet.
Two great headlands, formed by the wall-like terminations of Cogden and Harkerside Moors, rising one above the other, stand out magnificently. Their huge sides tower up nearly a thousand feet from the river, until they are within reach of the lowering clouds that every moment threaten to envelop them in their indigo embrace.
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