Terrella

“ The terral, or land-wind, which is usually strongest towards morning, moaned loudly on the hillside, and came rushing past with a melancholy sough, through the brushwood that surrounded the hut, shaking off the heavy dew from the palm and cocoa-nut trees, like large drops of rain. ”

“ When his dream is o’er, by the rock-reef shore,
In anger he rushes forth,
And calls each dread wave from its secret cave,
And beckons fierce blasts from the north.
Then proudly he rides o’er the boiling tides,
As they eddy around the rocks;
Whilst their awful roar on the wreck-strewn shore,
The hollow-voiced thunder mocks.
When ocean and cloud like a woven shroud,
Are all mingled into one,
Amidst the dense spray he pursues his way,
And hurries triumphant on. ”

“ QUAFFING THE STORM.
The enkindled storm swept ragingly into the great forest
And the forest stirred aquiver and sang
With gloomy voices
As when time in chaos began.
All trees clenched themselves in violence, in strife,
An eagle the forest became,
Beating its pinions before avenging wrath of the storm
Aloft to the richly-clad vault. ”

“ Everywhere the weird beauty, the immense melancholy of tropic ruin. Magnificent terraces, once golden with cane, now abandoned to weeds and serpents;—deserted plantation-homes, with trees rooted in the apartments and pushing up through the place of the roofs;—grass-grown alleys ravined by rains;—fruit-trees strangled by lianas;—here and there the stem of some splendid palmiste, brutally decapitated, naked as a mast;—petty frail growths of banana-trees or of bamboo slowly taking the place of century-old forest giants destroyed to make charcoal. ”

“ Out in the open, the broad, sloping hillside and the valley bottom lay literally hidden under ridge upon ridge of smashed and riddled human forms, and the heaped débris of human battle. The clouds hung thick and close above, as if to keep the stars from beholding this repellent sample of earth’s titanic beast, Man, at his worst. ”

“ Stern caught a glimpse of the tall forest growing up to within a hundred yards of the edge, then of smaller trees, dwindling to bushes and grasses, and strange red sand that bordered the gap--sand and rocks, barren as though some up-draft from the void had killed off vegetable growth along the very brink.
Then all slid back and away. The red-ribbed wall of the great chasm, shattered and broken as by some inconceivable disaster, some cosmic cataclysm, fell away and away, downward, dimmer and more dim, until it faded gradually into a blue haze, then vanished utterly. ”

“ I have forgotten the name of the place, its location on the map, the name of its people,—one has little to do with detail in the Inferno,—but that dinner never will I forget, any more than the Tenderfoot will forget his first sight of water the day when the Desert "held us up."
Once the brown veil lifted to the eastward. We, souls struggling, saw great mountains and the whiteness of eternal snow. That noon we crossed a river, hurrying down through the flat plain, and in its current came the body of a drowned bear-cub, an alien from the high country. ”

“ But it can also happen that, when the land comes toward the sea, it raises a wall of hills in front of it—as though the sea were something dangerous. When the land does this, the sea comes up to it with fiery wrath, and beats and roars and lashes against the rocks, and looks as if it would tear the land-hill to pieces. ”

“ Here and there, between gaps in the volcanic chain, the land hollows into gorges, slopes down into ravines;—and the sea's vast disk of turquoise flames up through the interval. Southwardly those deep woods, through which the way winds down, shut in the view.... You do not see the plantation buildings till you have advanced some distance into the valley;—they are hidden by a fold of the land, and stand in a little hollow where the road turns: a great quadrangle of low gray antiquated edifices, heavily walled and buttressed, and roofed with red tiles. ”

“ In the central zone, lying parallel to the former, the plain and the forest long contend with each other for the possession of the soil; the trees prevail for some distance, but gradually dwindle into stunted and thorny bushes, only reappearing in belts of forest along the banks of the streams, until finally in the south, the victory remains with the plain, which displays its smooth, velvet-like surface unbounded and unbroken. ”

“ We’re like the scaly, finny Oldest Inhabitants in the poem, who dreamed away their lives in the coral grove, while a seven stanza storm roared across the ocean overhead. When the storm of progress cuts a little below the surface we Granite folk blink upward from our dreams in pained disapproval. ”

“ They are too wide, too boundless for picture. The plain which lay outstretched before him, rising and falling like a vast prairie, was unmarked by habitation—not a hovel, not a hut to be seen. Vast groups of rocks stood out here and there abruptly, grotesque and strange in outline, as though giants had been petrified in the act of some great conflict, the stunted trees that crowned the summits serving as feathers on the helmets. ”

“ Broken and irregular peaks eroded into thousands of valleys of all shapes and sizes gave lurking-places in which shadows still hid from the searching sun, like smugglers on a frontier. Though a certain grandiose beauty grew out of these crude, planless forms of nature, they ended by giving the beholder a disquieting sadness. ”

“ It is a place of rocks, of heather and large-rooted ferns, and it is very steep, terrace rising upon terrace to the heights. At the bottom of the valley are trees; here also is a wild path and a wild stream broken upon the rocks, and becoming whole again at the foot of a glen. For centuries the place has been haunted in men's imagination, and they have avoided it because it is a garden of—angels. I am going now to make it bloom, I am going to grasp that solitude and weave with it a mantle of light. I am going to walk on my pixy-path and watch the shadows creeping up and down my pixy-glen ”

“ The whole forest ablaze, the sky red with lighted fragments flying before the high wind over cleared spaces, creeks, and roads, and igniting, like the torches of a thousand incendiaries, fences, orchards, farms, crops, and buildings in many places at once, had happily never been seen before. ”

“ The purple shades of twilight soon clouded the scene, deepened by the heavy masses of foliage, which cast greater obscurity upon their narrow path; for they had now left the oak-flat and entered the gorge of the valley. The utter loneliness of the path, the grotesque shadows of the trees that stretched in long array across the steep banks on either side, taking now this, now that wild and fanciful shape, awakened strange feelings of dread in the mind of these poor forlorn wanderers; like most persons bred up in solitude, their imaginations were strongly tinctured with superstitious fears. ”

“ Instead of the wide-spreading woods that usually hang round the skirts of lofty mountains, covering up their nakedness from the eye, nothing here was to be seen but masses of shattered rock, black as if scathed by volcanic fires, and heaped one upon another in a sort of wild confusion, as if some tremendous convulsion of nature had torn the hills from their foundations, and thrown them into primitive chaos. ”

“ Now the surface was a lethal desert of slag and rolling clouds. Endless clouds drifted back and forth, blotting out the red Sun. Occasionally something metallic stirred, moving through the remains of a city, threading its way across the tortured terrain of the countryside. ”

“ The old terraces are indeed gone. The idyllic villages, the blossoming slopes are a waste of volcanic ashes and scoriæ through which the dauntless vegetation is only now beginning to struggle. The blue waters are displaced and muddy, but the disaster of one shock could not rob the land of its extraordinary mystery and beauty. ”

“ Break of day in Winter time comes to the Dead Lands slowly and without enthusiasm, as if the rosy morning sun wearied at the hopeless landscape which its rays must illumine. Aimless rock formation was a drug on the creation’s market the day that the Bad Lands were made. ”

“ The ridges back of them were twisted and notched by ancient geologic contortions, washed by countless rains and bleached by unnumbered centuries of sun—a strange jumble of earth and rocks and stunted trees; a place to breed superstitious fears, and warp the soul of a man with loneliness. ”

“ You will well understand, what this rolling red river must have been in the fatal night, with the black sky shrouded with sun, crowned with lightnings like a revengeful divinity, this slow and voracious river, which has swallowed up half a country. You will well understand, how a picturesque little village can have been destroyed in its rich lands, in one of its fractions, in its first houses. ”

“ We wondered how the valley appeared to them and what bird songs burst upon the fragrant air when that other race possessed the land. Our thoughts were soon recalled from the vague past; for over the summit of a green hill a thunder head pushed itself into view. As the great mass spread swiftly over the heavens, darkness began to creep over the land like a premature twilight. ”

“ So came they to the brow and looked over it into a valley, about which on all sides went the ridge, save where it was broken down into a narrow pass on the further side, so that the said valley was like to one of those theatres of the ancient Roman Folk, whereof are some to be seen in certain lands. Neither did those desert benches lack their sitters; for all down the sides of the valley sat or lay children of men; some women, but most men-folk, of whom the more part were weaponed, and some with their drawn swords in their hands. ”

“ From equine bell-ringers comes over the hill.
But now the dull dawning gives place to the morning:
The sun, springing up in a glorious flood
Of golden-shot fire, mounts higher and higher,
Till the crests of the sandhills are stained with his blood. ”

“ Out at last came the wanderers upon a higher region still, and now they had to traverse for miles a kind of hilly plateau that looked altogether like the work of some wonderful landscape gardener. It was a plateau covered with innumerable little tree-clad, fern-clad, moss-clad, flower-covered hills, with rocks in the shape of gray needles, silvery boulders, square towers, domes, and minarets, peeping up through the foliage everywhere. Round and among these wound many a little footpath—the footpaths of wild beasts—but none, probably, more dangerous than the timid agouti, the cavy, or peccary. ”

“ Nothing but the absolute nakedness of desolation could seem to him dreary. But this region must have satisfied even a person accustomed to deserts and pastures of rocks. It is a jumble of savage hills and jagged ravines, a land of limestone rocks and ledges, whitish gray in color, glaring in the sun, even the stones wasted by age, relieved nowhere by a tree, or rejoiced by a single blade of grass. ”

“ Each steady stalk is a plumed standard of pioneer conquest, and through its palmy leaves the chastened wind remorsefully sighs requiems, chanting, whispering, moaning and sighing from balmy springtime on through the heat of the long summer days, until in the frost the farmers cutting the stalks and stacking them evenly about in the semblance of long departed tepees, leave no dangling blades to sigh through, nor tassels to flout. ”

“ Now and again the darkness would be illuminated by the glare of star-shells. I think I mentioned to you before the mournful desolation of this war-scarred countryside—land without grass, without trees, without houses, nothing more now than a wilderness, with yawning shell craters innumerable, and here and there blackened and branchless stumps that used to be trees. We were near the site of a village famous in the annals of British arms. A single brick of that village would be worth its weight in gold as a souvenir. ”

“ Do you want to know about storms that leave the worst Northern trails a summer picnic, and muskegs and tundra that leave you searching for something bigger than miles to measure with, and barren, fly-ridden territory without a leaf or blade of grass and scored every way at once with rifts and water canyons so you can't tell the north from the Desert of Sahara? ”

“ Innumerable landslips have torn their sides which, at periods of great distance, have fallen away from the cliff, heaping the ground with vast swellings and ridges, in much romantic confusion. Even to-day, these landslips continue, and the aspect of the country is slowly but continually transformed. ”

“ On either hand gray walls and square grim keeps peeped out at every few miles from amid the forests while the few villages which they passed were all ringed round with rude walls, which spoke of the constant fear and sudden foray of a wild frontier land. ”

“ Low hills of yellow sand, shimmering in glassy heat-waves, were covered with innumerable derricks, which in the distance looked like a weird forest without leaf or shade and near at hand suggested to her grotesque creatures animated by unnatural life, their long necks moving up and down with a chugging sound. ”

“ The green slopes of the hill above are scarred all along with old earthworks, so defaced by plough and spade, so trampled down by men and cattle, so worn by the storms of untold centuries, that the eye can hardly trace their outlines in the smooth short sward. ”

“ He lets loose the rivers, and pours them over the land. At the same time, he heaves the land with an earthquake, and brings in the reflux of the ocean over the shores. Flocks, herds, men, and houses are swept away, and temples, with their sacred enclosures, profaned. ”