Altair

“ In consulting the map, the observer is supposed to face toward the east. In Aquila the curious arrangement of two stars on either side of the chief star of the constellation, called Altair, at once attracts the eye. Within a circle including the two attendants of Altair you will probably be able to see with the naked eye only two or three stars in addition to the three large ones. Now turn your glass upon the same spot, and you will see eight or ten times as many stars, and with a field-glass still more can be seen. ”

“ The great mountain system of the Altai, (the “gold mountains” of Menander of Byzantium, an historical writer who lived as early as the 7th century, the Altaï-alin of the Moguls, and the Kin-schan of the Chinese) , forms the southern boundary of the great Siberian lowlands; and running between 50° and 521⁄2° of north latitude, extends from the rich silver mines of the Snake Mountains, and the confluence of the Uba and the Irtysh, to the meridian of Lake Baikal. ”

“ The area covered by perpetual snow is very considerable, and glaciers occupy a large area. In the high lands the winter is very severe, but on the whole the climate is comparatively mild and is also healthy. The flora of the Altai Mountains greatly resembles that of the Alps, about five-sixths of the latter being found here. The mountain forests are composed of birch, alder, aspen, fir, larch, stone-pine, &c. The wild sheep has here its native home, and several kinds of deer are found. The Altai is exceedingly rich in minerals, including gold, silver, copper, and iron. ”

“ The Bernese Alps in miniature. A dark violet sea, and Alps in burnished silver, with the colors of the rainbow dissolving among them. Lofty ridges, of the shape of flames, have the tint of flame; out of the purity of lilies bloom the pink and rose; sky-blue shadows sleep in the defiles; I will not say cloth of gold drapes, but water of gold washes—water of green, of orange, scarlet, crimson, purple, wash the crags and steeps; strange metallic tints gleam in the shaggy caverns—copper, bronze, and gold. Endless grace of form and outline!—endless, endless beauty! ”

“ The daring traveller who beards the Winter-king in his own realms meets no more with massive and lofty mountain-crests; a few only of the great chains of Europe and Asia—here the Scandinavian Alps, there the Oural Mountains; still further, at the easternmost extremity of Asia, some scattered summits, which we may consider as belonging to the elevation of the Altai, prolong even to the Arctic shores their cantled and snow-shrouded peaks. ”

“ John gazed at the vast mass of the Alps, stretching their tremendous rampart across the very heart of Europe. The Arrow had gone higher, and deep down in the south he saw the ridges and sharp peaks stretching on apparently to infinity. But it was a wild and desolate world. Even as he looked the far edges dropped away in the gloom of advancing clouds. The gray of the horizon became black and sinister. ”

“ No conclusion can be more incontestable than that these angular blocks of granite, gneiss, and other crystalline formations, came from the Alps, and that they have been brought for a distance of 50 miles and upwards across one of the widest and deepest valleys of the world; so that they are now lodged on the hills and valleys of a chain composed of limestone and other formations, altogether distinct from those of the Alps. Their great size and angularity, after a journey of so many leagues, has justly excited wonder, for hundreds of them are as large as cottages ”

“ The great masters of the Renaissance never painted the Alps, continues the other, with, remembering Titian, doubtful accuracy. In short, we are given to understand, as politely as may be, that the hill-country may be good for those dull souls which, incapable naturally of appreciating more delicate or subtle charms, require to be strongly stirred; but that to the artist's eye the Alps are the chromolithography of nature—that, in fact, a taste for mountain scenery is bad taste. ”

“ WHO has ever occupied himself seriously with the investigation of the “night-side of Nature,” or studied the works of Theophrastus Paracelsus, and not become acquainted with the celebrated “Untersberg” (the “mountain of the lower world”) and its mysterious inhabitants, the fairies and gnomes? [2] Like a gigantic outpost of the Austrian Alps, this snow-capped wing of the mountains stands on the frontier of Germany, overlooking the Bavarian plains, dotted with hills, forests, and lakes. ”

“ Many people and animals inhabit them, and almost every metal is dug out of the Alps, especially silver. 'Mid such charms as these men live among the mountains, and Nature blooms as if Venus, Bacchus, and Ceres reigned there. No one who saw the Alps from afar would believe what a delicious Paradise is to be found amid the eternal snow and mountains of perpetual winter and never-melting ice.'
Very limited praise only extended to the valleys! ”

“ Huge masses of rock have been literally hewn away, until nothing has remained behind but those splintered obelisks and tapering pinnacles so familiar to the eye amidst the sublime scenery of the Alps. Indeed one of the greatest perils encountered by the adventurous spirits whose ambition it is to rival one another in the danger of their exploits, and to climb whatever was before regarded as inaccessible, arises from the enormous fragments of rock which are rent almost unceasingly from the overhanging crags and hurled into the abysses below them. ”

“ There stands the patriarch of the Alps, crowned with the centuries, and still smiling grimly at Time.
It stands alone in its fearful beauty. Of all the European mountains, it impresses the mind with the power of the forces, the source of which are hidden to man, and which it is not given to man to comprehend. One feels his own insignificance as he gazes on this wonderful peak, and, no matter what his creed, feels a profound reverence for whatever power he believes created it. ”

“ But above everything rose the lofty and beautiful spire of the Gothic cathedral, still untouched.
All the time the moonlight had been steadily growing more brilliant. Save where the burning houses and the flashing of the cannon cast a red glow a veil of silver mist, which brightened rather than obscured, hung over the snow. John distinctly saw Germans in the town and often, too, he saw them fall.
A man with a bugle was lying in the snow near Bougainville and the little colonel reached over and touched him. ”

“ I think it must often be the lot of the good people of Altorf to gnaw a hard crust; for these mountains are fine brewing-places for the winds; and the vale a very trough to receive and hold them fast.
A smart young maiden was to introduce us to the interior of the ivied Tower, so romantic in its situation above the roaring stream, at the mouth of the glen, which, behind, is buried beneath overhanging woods. ”

“ So is it also with the opposite picture seen from the Rigi Kulm—the other strangely-contrasted half of the wonderful whole—the long range of Alps on the south. It is not their mountain massiveness, and colouring only—unwonted sight to English eyes—that are capable of interesting. They are something more than Nature’s architecture in many forms—pyramids, towers, buttresses, pinnacles—appealing merely to the sense of grandeur, of power, and of awe. ”

“ Instinctively we summon up recollections of the Alps for comparison with the mountains we are leaving. And the comparison is not found to be entirely a sacrilege. The Alps are first and preeminent among European mountains; the repose of their immensity, the sense of power, the indefinable, spell they exert, lesser ranges cannot in general features attempt to rival. But this is not to say that a lesser range, is a wholly inferior range,—that even in this effect of immensity, of power, it may not at certain points bear almost full comparison. ”

“ Beyond the limits of the Leman, the Alps shot up into still higher pinnacles, occasionally showing one of those naked excrescences of granite, which rise for a thousand feet above the rest of the range--a trifle in the stupendous scale of the vast piles--and which, in the language of the country are not inaptly termed Dents, from some fancied and plausible resemblance to human teeth. ”

“ The wall of granite in the heavens was the same to them as to you. They have ceased to look upon it; you will soon cease to look also, and the granite wall will be for others. Then, mingled with these more solemn imaginations, come the understandings of the gifts and glories of the Alp;—the fancying forth of all the fountains that well from its rocky walls, and strong rivers that are born out of its ice, and of all the pleasant valleys that wind between its cliffs, and all the châlets that gleam among its clouds, and happy farmsteads couched upon its pastures ”

“ But when the "hideous Alps" became the "matchless heights," the "palaces of Nature," when poets had sung their praises lustily, and it had dawned upon the minds of unpoetic men that they were not merely obstacles to be crossed, but objects to be looked at and admired;—then were gathered slowly the advance guards of that mighty army of sight-seers which sweeps over Europe to-day. ”

“ On one side are barren and bleak rocks, rearing their snow-clad summits into the clouds; and here and there the eye catches a glimpse of one of the ancient passes over the mountains, formed by the Romans, and which have probably been often trodden by Trajan and his legions during the wars of that emperor in this part of Germany; on the other, or left side of the valley, the mountains are lower, and seem to glory in the beauty and luxuriance of their beech woods, through whose foliage rocks of grey limestone are often seen jutting out. ”

“ As the Altaï range, the great Siberian chain, has always been famous for its rich mines of every possible metal ore, and as the valleys of the Altaï are known to be the nests from which innumerable Turanian tribes scattered to the north and south, and in which many dwell to this day after their own nomadic fashion, there is no extravagance in supposing that there may have been our Accads' original point of departure. ”

“ Fifty beautiful youths, in silken robes, carried a basin in each hand; and one of these basins was filled with pieces of gold, the other with precious stones of an inestimable value. Attalus, so long the sport of fortune and of the Goths, was appointed to lead the chorus of the hymeneal song; and the degraded Emperor might aspire to the praise of a skilful musician. The Barbarians enjoyed the insolence of their triumph; and the provincials rejoiced in this alliance, which tempered, by the mild influence of love and reason, the fierce spirit of their Gothic lord. ”

“ It is not by the splendor of far-off views, which have lent such a glory to the Alps, that these impress the mind, but by a gigantic disorder of enormous masses and a savage sublimity of naked rock in wonderful contrast with innumerable green spots of a rich floral beauty shut up in their stern recesses. Their wildness seems well suited to the character of the people who inhabit the country. ”

“ Our love of the Alps is a Gothic, a Teutonic, instinct; sympathetic with all that is vague, infinite, and insubordinate to rules, at war with all that is defined and systematic in our genius. This we may perceive in individuals as well as in the broader aspects of arts and literatures. ”

“ There should have been some decent building, 219 pagan or Christian, crowning the noble site of its arx, the noblest in our whole range.
With Alatri we end one main stage of our iter, that of the hill-cities. We shall henceforth pass by places which lie more in the world, some of them in the thick of modern communication. But if we had turned back at Alatri, we should have done a good stroke of work. A journey to the walls of the Hernicans is in every way pleasant and profitable. And in truth, even if we throw in the Old-Latins and the Volscians, it is not a journey of hardships. ”

“ No more strong or decided example need be desired of nearly all the points of contrast between the best work, north and south of the Alps, than this, the first great northern Gothic church seen on the homeward way, presents, when compared with all the work which has nevertheless been studied with so much pleasure and advantage on the southern side of the Alps. ”

“ The Pyrenees, on the western side of the Mare Nectaris, extend in a meridional direction for nearly 190 miles, and include a peak east of Guttemberg of nearly 12,000 feet, and are traversed in many places by fine valleys.
The Altai Mountains form a magnificent chain, 275 miles in length, commencing on the outer eastern slope of Piccolomini, and following a tolerably direct north-east course, with a few minor bendings, to the west side of Fermat, where they turn more towards the north, ultimately terminating about midway between Tacitus and Catherina. ”

“ In the whole range of my Alpine experience I have seen nothing more striking than this desolate, ruined and shattered ridge at the back of the Great Tower. I have seen stranger shapes—rocks which mimic the human form, with monstrous leering faces, and isolated pinnacles sharper and greater than any here—but I have never seen exhibited so impressively the tremendous effects which may be produced by frost, and by the long-continued action of forces whose individual effects are imperceptible. ”

“ Presently we find Gothic chiefs marching at pleasure through the dominions of the Eastern Cæsar; but they simply march and ravage; it is not till they have got within the boundary of the West that they found any lasting kingdoms. In fact, the Goths, and the Teutonic tribes generally, had no real mission in the East; to them the East was a mere highway to the West. ♦Career of Alaric. A.D. 394-410.♦ The movements of Alaric in Greece, Illyricum, and Italy, his sieges and his capture of Rome, are of the highest historical importance, but they do not touch geography. ”