Sweeping along its terrible path, the tramp
of that conflagration filled the air with an uproar like the
bursting of billows on a rocky shore."
Across a narrow valley gigantic boulders seemed to have
accumulated and formed masses that appeared to be slowly
creeping downward. Farther away we beheld the serrated mountains
breaking into the wildest confusion of pinnacles, which rose
above the forest and relieved their masses of vivid green tints
like ruined castles along the Rhine, clothing them with an
atmosphere of age. Far up as the eye could reach, the broken
rocks were piled in huge chaos. "Here as your eye sweeps over
these fragments of a former earthquake, your imagination recalls
that remote period when the mountains were split like lightning-
riven oaks, and the great peaks swayed like trees in a blast and
the roar of a thousand storms rolled away from the yawning gulf,
into which precipices and forests went down with a deafening
crash as of a falling world."
The rugged sides of mountains often gave us views on almost as
grand a scale as that of the Alps. Only there, height above
height, rise those rocky ramparts where snowy cascades leap
hundreds of feet, then leap again where those chaotic and
fantastic rocks and immeasurable sweep of terraced hills stretch
away like another world. You will ever remember the Gorge du
Loup with its seven-arched viaduct and stream of vivid green and
the white foam that pours between its piers.
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