There never was a stranger
contrast than between the hideous desolation of the crater below,
and those blue and jewelled summits rising above the shifting
clouds.
After some time the scene shifted, and through glacial rifts
appeared as in a dream the Eeka mountains which enfold the Iao
valley, broad fields of cane 8000 feet below, the flushed palm-
fringed coast, and the deep blue sea sleeping in perpetual calm.
But according to the well-known fraud which isolated altitudes
perpetrate upon the eye, it appeared as if we were looking up at our
landscape, not down; and no effort of the eye or imagination would
put things at their proper levels.
But gradually the clouds massed themselves, the familiar earth
disappeared, and we were "pinnacled in mid-heaven" in unutterable
isolation, blank forgotten units, in a white, wonderful, illuminated
world, without permanence or solidity. Our voices sounded thin in
the upper air. The keen, incisive wind that swept the summit, had
no kinship with the soft breezes which were rustling the tasselled
cane in the green fields of earth which had lately gleamed through
the drift. It was a new world and without sympathy, a solitude
which could be felt.
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