Mountain village

“ The village of Florac is high up among the hills, built along certain ledges of rock overlooking the valley, and going south in the train one catches sight of many towns, like it built among mountain declivities, hanging out like nests over the edge of precipices, showing against a red background, crowning the rocky hill. ”

“ Each mountain face, each white village, either couched on the water's edge or grouped about its slender campanile on some shoulder of the hills, each house and tree and figure seemed still penetrated with light, the glorified creatures of some just revealed and already fading world. ”

“ No wonder the children fear Heimweh will come to their hearts when they can no longer see the little village houses all huddled together round the church with the tall spire, while the green hills rise on every side, and the morning mists roll from them, and the evening glow warms and glorifies their cold, white summits, and the impetuous mountain torrent goes foaming by. ”

“ We descend the mountain into a naked, desolate region, our path lying over rocky plateaus, through deep ravines, and over barren hills covered with loose stones and sharp rocks. A small village is seen away to our left on a lofty hill, flags and streamers flying, guns firing, and groups of men and women gaily attired, in open air, rejoicing in the dance. We pass several towns perched among the gray rocks, on the mountain slopes, or crowning the summits of high hills, also several sites of ancient towns overspread with ruins. ”

“ O'er this wild romantic hill-side
Wildly blow the winds of winter,
Softly sigh the summer zephyrs;
Sad and lonely seems the forest,
Watching o'er the empty cellars.
On a boulder by the roadside,
Is a worn inscription telling
Briefly of the ancient village.
Ever flowing, winding southward,
Still the Tunxis River murmurs
Of the Light House on the hill-side
And the people of the village.
Standing there beside the river
Echoes of the past come floating,
On the sighing breezes floating,
Voices of the Light House people,
From the lonely mountain shadows,
Home of ageless Molly Barber. ”

“ It has an immense sky for a mountain village, and the air is buoyant, fresh, perfect. All around are rosy porphyry rocks, and like a gleam in fairyland the sunlight comes upon them at dawn. This is the village to have a cottage in ”

“ These mountain villages, hidden under oaks and vines, with waters trickling through their lanes, a fine climate and a soil that bears everything needful for life, must be ideal habitations for simple folks. ”

“ I keep a mountain anchored off eastward a little way, which I ascend in my dreams both awake and asleep. Its broad base spreads over a village or two, which does not know it; neither does it know them, nor do I when I ascend it. I can see its general outline as plainly now in my mind as that of Wachusett. I do not invent in the least, but state exactly what I see. I find that I go up it when I am light-footed and earnest. It ever smokes like an altar with its sacrifice. I am not aware that a single villager frequents it or knows of it. I keep this mountain to ride instead of a horse. ”

“ The pools of calm water lie clear beneath their fallen rocks, the water-lilies gleam, and the reeds whisper among their shadows; the village rises again over the forgotten graves, and its church tower, white through the storm-light, proclaims a renewed appeal to His protection in whose hand "are all the corners of the earth, and the strength of the hills is His also." There is no loveliness of Alpine valley that does not teach the same lesson. ”

“ Every day I walk up this hill—every day I pause at the top to admire the broad winding road with the green waste on each side, uniting it with the thickly timbered hedgerows; the two pretty cottages at unequal distances, placed so as to mark the bends; the village beyond, with its mass of roofs and clustered chimneys peeping through the trees; and the rich distance, where cottages, mansions, churches, towns, seem embowered in some wide forest, and shut in by blue shadowy hills. Every day I admire this most beautiful landscape ”

“ The women may still be seen grinding the com in quaint hand-mills, and all the associations of the village carry one's mind back to the earliest pioneers of civilisation. So delightful is this region of dense primeval forest, of valleys where the torrents carve their way through the roots of huge pines, of tiny oases of grass, and banks buried in raspberry-canes loaded with delicious fruit, that the mountaineer is apt to lose sight of the path of duty and abandon himself to lazing on the grass and watching the tiny specks of sunlight dancing amongst the foliage. ”

“ As the sun sank the distant hills became rose-flushed, and then one by one the flush died off into the paleness of death, and in the gathering blue-grayness, in desolation without sublimity, in ghastliness, impressive but only by force of ghastliness, and in benumbing cold, we rode into this village, and into a yard encumbered with mighty piles of snow, on one side of which I have a wretched room, though the best, with two doors, which do not shut, but when they are closed make it quite dark—a deep, damp, cobwebby, dusty, musty lair like a miserable eastern cowshed. ”

“ When we came out to look up the valley to the open country, we saw no signs of fighting, nor any one moving about. Through the valley, as we went up it, there was no smoke from the huts, no women bruising nuts and ground roots into meal, no fat man before the hut with two doors sitting on his mats, not a soul in the village. ”

“ The scenery is, I think, among the finest in the world, while, added to all is the strange fascination of the knowledge that the people who live in the Pass have cherished from generation to generation the most vindictive blood feuds. The villages are surrounded by high walls, loopholed along the top, and the huts in the inside are built against the wall, so that the roofs of them can be used by the men of the village as lounges during the day, and as ramparts for sentries during the night. ”

“ When, after a steep ascent, we had reached the top of the hill, we saw a village about half a mile before us on the side of another hill, which rose up above the spot where we were, after a descent, a sort of valley or hollow. Nothing grew upon this ground, or the hills above or below, but heather, yet round about the village—which consisted of a great number of huts, all alike, and all thatched, with a few larger slated houses among them, and a single modern-built one of a considerable size—were a hundred patches of cultivated ground, potatoes, oats, hay, and grass. ”

“ And towards nightfall the dusty road will be thronged with shadowy people and unladen asses and new-laden mules, urging silently into the country again, their backs to the town, glad to get away from the town, to see the cactus and the pleated hills, and the trees that mean a village. In some village they will lie under a tree, or under a wall, and sleep. ”

“ It is to the heart of one of these models of rural beauty that we now invite the attention of the reader. The immediate location of the village was in a sort of valley, close within the verge of an immense forest, and surrounded by an intervening underwood, which Nature had fashioned as a sort of defensive barrier. ”

“ To the north, fine woods are seen, and to the east, fir woods, the nearest being about 4 miles off. The village is small and wretchedly dirty, the paths being the worst of all I have seen on these hills. ”

“ Near the village, quantities of lodging-houses, built like Swiss châlets, are rising up everywhere in the wood, without walls, hedges, or gardens, just like a fairy story, and in the forest itself it is always warm, no winds or frosts penetrating the vast living walls of green. ”

“ Far and near are lovely white villages nestling under elms, in the heart of fields and meadows; and everywhere the long, narrow, accurately divided farms stretch downward to the river-shores. The best roads on the continent make this beauty and richness accessible; each little village boasts some natural wonder in stream, or lake, or cataract: and this landscape, magnificent beyond any in eastern America, is historical and interesting beyond all others. ”

“ Nestling into the gorges of the hills, and crowning eminences, were scattered villages of the true Atlas type, built all of mud, flat roofed, the houses rising one over the other like a succession of terraces or little castles, and being of so exactly the same shade as the denuded hills on which they stand as to be almost impossible to make out till you are right upon them. At times so like is village to hill, and hill to village, that I have taken an outstanding mound of earth to be a house, and many times have almost passed the village, not seeing it was there. ”

“ Peasant people sat under great cedars, planted to give shade to the travelers, and bade one feel at home in his lonely pilgrimage. Then one felt a peculiar feeling—this feeling will arise in any traveler—when, surmounting some hill range in the desert road, one descries, lying far below, embosomed in its natural bulwarks, the fair village, the resting-place, the little dwelling-place of men, where one is to sleep. ”

“ The village itself is located on the abrupt slopes of a steep, grassy hillside which rises from the river’s edge. The trading-stores and the residence of the priest, the church, log-huts of the natives and their barraboras are planted on a succession of three earthen terraces, one rising immediately behind the other. All communication from flat to flat is by slippery staircases, which are fraught with great danger to a thoughtless pedestrian, especially when fogs moisten the steps and darkness obscures his vision. ”

“ Occasional oases of life appeared here and there, a few wheat-fields and a wretched mud-built village, or a picturesque scene of smoke-browned tents, gayly dressed nomads, and grazing flocks and herds. ”

“ From time to time you rumble through the one street of a village, or rather of a small town of historic antiquity, grown rusty with too much sunshine, the houses crowded closely together and connected by dark archways, a network of covered lanes which climb the sheer cliff with snatches of light from above, openings like the mouths of mines affording glimpses of broods of children with curly hair like a halo about their heads, baskets of luscious fruit, a woman descending the rough pavements with a pitcher on her head or a distaff in her hand. ”

“ I now wheel along a smooth, level road leading through several orchard-environed villages; general cultivation and an atmosphere of peace and plenty seems to pervade the valley, which, with its scattering villages amid the foliage of their orchards, looks most charming upon emerging from the gloomy environments of the rock-ribbed and verdureless ravine; a fitting background is presented on the south by a mountain-chain of considerable elevation, upon the highest peaks of which still linger tardy patches of snow. ”

“ The village youth leaves the home of his childhood for the city, but the river doubling on itself, the overhanging alders and willows, the fringe of level meadow, the chalk hills bounding the river valley and rising against the sky, with here and there on their summits solitary clusters of beech, the light and peace of the different seasons, of morning, afternoon and evening, never forsake him. ”

“ It stood on the crest of a high ridge, from which the whole earth fell away in beautiful undulations. From almost any house in the village one could see for miles down the four roads that wound up to it, and there was always a brisk competition in progress as to who should be the first to spy an approaching traveler. ”

“ Summer and winter for many long years has it stood there on the edge of the cliff, waiting for the rush of travel which never came; ready to give hospitality to man and beast, but no wayfarer ever knocks for admission and entertainment. There is nothing sadder than a deserted village. ”

“ It is surrounded by fine woods and pleasure-grounds, laid out in the formal style, which is still the characteristic of French landscape-gardening. Nothing can be more beautiful than the surrounding scenery, the winding river with its vineyards hanging in terraces from the opposite heights, the village reposing beneath sun-lit hills, while corn-fields, pasture-land, and cattle grazing, convey the most pleasing ideas of the comfort of those who dwell upon this luxuriant soil. ”

“ They will close their eyes and see a little village on a low ridge, lost in the forest, overgrown with oak and chestnut and black walnut... buried in autumn colour, the streets drifted deep in autumn leaves, great branches interlacing over the roofs of the houses, wells of cool water that tastes of moss and tree roots. ”

“ The village is a straggling one, built out of grey stone and put together from the remains of ancient ruins. In the barrenest of pasture land, and having no more than three months’ summer, it is strange that anyone should have chosen to live there. ”

“ Heavy night dews there feed the wild flowers that sicken in the nerveless pallor of the summer sea-air, and fresh water runs swiftly from mountain springs. Sometimes they are narrow and hidden valleys, in whose depth even villages could scarce find a home, did they not climb the hill-sides on either hand, and camp out, as it were, upon the meadows or among the vineyards. Or, again, they are wider, so that little towns have been built within them—quaint towns with tall houses and taller campanile, at whose side there flows, perhaps, a shallow river, brown upon its shingly bed. ”

“ A few miles farther up the valley I wheel through a small village that nestles amid surroundings the loveliest I have yet seen. Dark, frowning firs intermingled with the lighter green of other vegetation crown the surrounding spurs of the Knibis Mountains; vineyards, small fields of waving rye, and green meadow cover the lower slopes with variegated beauty, at the foot of which huddles the cluster of pretty cottages amid scattered orchards of blossoming fruit-trees. ”