Pinnace

“ The steepest rocks here rose precipitously over the valley, and the white stone formed long pinnacles, round domes, globes resting on their pillars, in a word, the strangest shapes, so that our wondering eyes were tempted to see in them towers, castles, and monuments, while farther on the mountain masses rose above each other with a reddish-blue tinge, and touched the clouds with a few isolated peaks. ”

“ We approach it through a labyrinth of enormous shapeless masses of granite, which during ages have fallen from the cliffs above, that frown over the very temple, and in all probability will some day themselves descend in ruins and crush it. Around the inclosure, and among these masses, for some distance up the mountain, a few fine old pine-trees throw a dark shade and form a magnificent foreground; while the river runs impetuously in its shingly bed, and the stifled but fearful sound of the stones which it rolls along with it, crushing together, mixes with the roar of its waters. ”

“ His eyes, sweeping now across the field of tumbled rocks which topped the ridge at the base of his peak, were arrested by a flat piece of granite resting on top of a boulder which rose conspicuously above its neighbors.
A monument!
Here, where only a second ago he had told himself that perhaps no other human foot than his own had come! The old sign of a man-made trail, the sign to be read from afar, to last on into eternity. For the shrieking winds of winter and the racing snows do not budge the flat rock laid carefully upon flat-topped stone. ”

“ We started at half past seven in the morning, and within an hour or so, were out upon the open Campagna. For twelve miles, we went climbing on, over an unbroken succession of mounds, and heaps, and hills, of ruin. Tombs and temples, overthrown and prostrate; small fragments of columns, friezes, pediments; great blocks of granite and marble; mouldering arches, grass-grown and decayed; ruin enough to build a spacious city from; lay strewn about us. ”

“ The explorer lies there without name or headstone to mark his awful resting-place. The mountain is his monument. He is alone with its majesty. He is there in the clouds, in the tempests, where the lightnings play, and thunders leap, amid the elemental tumult, in the occasional great calm and silence and the pale sunlight. It is the most majestic, the most lonesome grave on earth. ”

“ I yield myself to, but cannot account for the fascination of this vast field of desolation, this waste of crumbled limestone, gouged into ravines and hills, honeycombed with tombs and mummy-pits, strewn with the bones of ancient temples, brightened by the glow of sunshine on elegant colonnades and sculptured walls, saddened by the mud-hovels of the fellaheen. The dust is abundant, and the glare of the sun reflected from the high, white precipices behind is something unendurable. ”

“ At a distance of something over three hundred yards, an isolated pinnacle rose to a great height, one side dazzling in the sun's untempered light, the other shrouded in absolute darkness. Everywhere the plain was strewn with loose and scattered rocks and covered with a soft, white detritus. ”

“ A mountain, a fossil from deepest geological horizon, a ruin of human art, carry us back into the perspective of centuries with a force that has become, perhaps, a little conventional. No imperishableness{52} of mountain-peak or of fragment of human work, broken pillar or sand-worn image half lifted over pathetic desert,—none of these link the past and to-day with anything like the power of these monuments of living antiquity, trees that began to grow before the Christian era, and, full of hale vitality and green old age, still bid fair to grow broad and high for centuries to come. ”

“ Nature doesn’t go out of her way, as some man had done, to get a block of granite, carry it a hundred yards up-hill, and place it upon a rock of another kind and shade where it can be the more conspicuous.
One monument calls for another in a trackless field of stone. In a moment, farther along the ridge, he found the second monument. He hurried to it. Yonder, lower on the slope, was the third; a hundred yards farther on, the fourth!
He got the trend of the trail now, for it curved only a bit, and then ran straight, straight toward the eastern rim of the valley lying far below him. ”

“ A forest of white marble pinnacles, a wilderness of elegant statues, an interminable maze, and never-ending mass of bewildering tracery, greets the beholder, who finds himself gaping at it in astonishment, and wondering where he will begin to look it over, or if it will be possible for him to see it all. The innumerable graceful pinnacles, surmounted by statues, the immense amount of luxurious carving prodigally displayed on every part of the exterior, strike the visitor with amazement. ”

“ Ages ago the massive granite boulders of the headland, loosened and undercut by the ceaseless assaults of wind and weather and the deadly quiet fingers of the frost, had come rolling down the slope till they settled afresh on new foundations, forming holes and crannies and little angular chambers where the splintered shoulders met. ”

“ Here the rocks of variegated limestone assume a bolder appearance, rising from forty to a hundred feet [232] in fantastic masses, looking in the distance sometimes like noble cities, sometimes like extensive ruins. There is one valley where columns, with their capitals of gigantic proportions, rise from mounds of sand—half buried palaces and temples seemed in the moonlight to make the former the abode of giants. ”

“ At some paces distant, a black and bare rock detaches itself like a promontory from the base of the mountain, and, suspended over Cedron and the valley, bears several old tombs of kings and patriarchs, formed in gigantic and singular architecture, and strikes like the bridge of death over the valley of lamentations. ”

“ The rock here is a sort of sand or pudding stone; there is no limestone or granite. And all the hills are tree-covered. To many this clothing of verdure is most restful and pleasing. I missed the sharp outlines, the delicate artistic sky lines, sharply defined in uplifted bare granite peaks and ridges, with the purple and violet color of the northern mountains, and which it seems to me that limestone and granite formations give. There are none of the great gorges and awful abysses of the White Mountains, both valleys and mountains here being more uniform in outline. ”

“ Why, it is worth a day’s journey to sit where I do now, under the shadow of a pine whose every sigh in the cool breeze is freighted with fragrance, and feast on the massively beautiful scenery. A foreground of a mile or two of meadow rich in green and gold; the beetling lava cliffs on the left, and the brown hills, studded with 76 great piles of granite, sloping gently down to the margins of the Grand. ”

“ Even if you have never learnt much of what is called geology, by keeping your eyes open and your mind awake you may see a great deal in the stones which have perhaps seemed to you most uninteresting. A block of granite from one of the Dartmoor hills, and a piece of slate from a Welsh quarry—how different these two kinds of stone are! We see this at once; but they become much more interesting when we know that each has its own history. ”

“ Never was any desolation more sublime and lovely. The perpendicular wall of ruin is cloven into steep ravines filled up with flowering shrubs, whose thick twisted roots are knotted in the rifts of the stones. At every step the aerial pinnacles of shattered stone group into new combinations of effect, and tower above the lofty yet level walls, as the distant mountains change their aspect to one travelling rapidly along the plain. ”

“ After an hour's rest at a fountain, we threaded the windings of the glen to a lower plain, quite shut in by the hills, whose ribs of marble showed through the forests of oak, holly, cedar, and pine, which dotted them. We were now fully entered into the hill-country, and our road passed over heights and through hollows covered with picturesque clumps of foliage. It resembled some of the wild western downs of America, and, but for the Phrygian tombs, whose doorways stared at us from every rock, seemed as little familiar with the presence of Man. ”

“ We must-not conceive of piles of bowlders or heaps of fragments, but a whole land of naked rock, with giant forms carved on it; cathedral-shaped buttes towering hundreds or thousands of feet; cliffs that can not be scaled, and cañon walls that shrink the river into insignificance; with vast hollow domes, and tall pinnacles and shafts set on the verge overhead. ”

“ To climb this mountain, which almost reached the skies, was impossible for it was formed of smooth granite, mixed with rocks of the finest crystal, which hung over us, and seemed every instant ready to fall upon our heads. ”

“ A tall flight of steep steps rudely fashioned of large unshapen blocks of stone, conducted to the entrance of the hermitage, and the dim light within its hoary, moss-grown, sloping walls is admitted through irregularly formed apertures, pierced through the dense body of the rock, and command magnificent views of the subjacent scenery. ”

“ Their yellow granite pinnacles, weathered into silver gray, rose up cold, stern, and steely blue from the glorious forests which drape their lower heights—winter above and summer below—then purpled into red as the sun sank, and gleamed above the twilight, till each glowing summit died out as lamps which are extinguished one by one, and the whole took on the ashy hue of death. ”

“ Nor yet can we of a stronger race stand among their moss-grown stumps{32} to-day without feeling the worshipful awe of the forest strong upon us. The gods are gone indeed, but the demigods remain. The spruces and firs, foster children of the great pines, stand close-set upon the ground that they once occupied and rear again the temple toward heaven in pinnacles and spires where once were darkly-vaulted domes. ”

“ It is a sloping ridge of red-brown granite, broken at its summit into a long line of picturesque towers and battlements, rising threateningly over an escarpment of débris. Such an illusion is too rarely encountered to be easily forgotten. It is hardly possible to doubt you are really looking at an antique ruin. ”

“ Looking up the valley from some high point, one almost imagines himself in the presence of the ruins of some gigantic city, so much like ancient castles and cathedrals do these rocks appear—a deception that is not a little heightened by the singular vertical furrows cut deep into the cliffs. ”

“ There is a lonely grave in the very heart of the pine forest, unmarked by cross or stone, above which no prayers but mine have ever been said, which the dark moss covers thickly, and around which the trees sound their everlasting dirge. ”

“ In about an hour we reached the summit of the first mountain; for there are four subordinate ridges to cross before you stand under the single block of granite forming the pinnacle.
CHOCORUA.
When reconnoitring this pinnacle through your glass, at a distance of five miles, you will say to scale it would be difficult; when you have climbed close underneath you will say it is impossible. After surveying it from the bare ledges of Bald Mountain, where we stood letting the cool breeze blow upon us, I asked my guide where we could ascend. ”

“ A smooth grassy slope, bounded, at the upper end, by venerable ruins half buried in ivy, at the lower, by a stream seen through arching trees—a dozen gaily-dressed people, seated in little groups here and there—some open hampers—the debris of a picnic—such were the Facts accumulated by the Scientific Researcher. ”

“ At the summit of an imposing mass of battlements, of which the first glance discerns neither the style nor the order, above terraces with ornamental balustrades, springs up, as if from a fertile and inexhaustible soil, an incredible vegetation of sculptured stone, worked in a thousand different ways. ”

“ Just one confused mass of basaltic crags and pinnacles, lofty ridges, so narrow that here and there where some part has broken away you can see the sky through an opening like the eye of a needle. Nature seems to have here built up gigantic rock-fortresses, mighty bastions and towers which reach up into heaven ”

“ Ten miles in less than half a day, and limestone walls below. Good cheer returns; we forget the storms, and the gloom, and cloud-covered cañons, and the black granite, and the raging river, and push our boats from shore in great glee. [Pg 151]
Though we are out of the granite, the river is still swift, and we wheel about a point again to the right, and turn, so as to head back in the direction from which we come, and see the granite again, with its narrow gorge and black crags; but we meet with no more great falls or rapids. ”

“ They drag with them from the regions whence they derive their origin all the ruins of the mountain, enormous rocks, and immense accumulations of sand and stones. These are driven onwards by the irresistible stream of solid ice; and when they arrive at a declivity of the mountain, sufficiently rapid, roll down, scattering ruin. ”

“ Every pinnacle and rock was lit up as by a heavenly fire, the pines were outlined like black sentinels against the sky, guardians of that merciful green life from which we spring and to which we return. ”

“ A broad deep valley, descending ledge after ledge, till its innermost depths are hidden from sight amid far-reaching shelves of reddish rock; below, everywhere studded with tufts of palm-groves, and clustering fruit-trees in dark green patches down to the farthest end of its windings; a large brown mass of irregular masonry crowning a central hill ”

“ A few olive-trees, a bare argillaceous soil scattered over with stones and flints, some ruins of ancient sepulchres, four water-tanks, some cisterns almost entirely dilapidated, and bare rocks, some of which exhibit traces of chiselling, are the only objects that meet the eye throughout the whole region of the north and north-west. ”