row their wild spells over the
civilised man of letters, and appeal to savage or poetical instincts
underlying all his culture. So now, where everything seen or unseen, was
new and strange, and the imagination was quite free to rove, the charm
was more intense. We stood and gazed upon the moving panorama like
persons in a trance. The trees and plants grew in zones according to
their different levels above the sea, after the manner of those on the
earth, but we were too high to distinguish the various kinds.
Apparently, however, feathery palms and gigantic grasses prevailed in
the lower, and glossy evergreens, resembling the magnolia and
rhododendron, in the middle grounds. All this part of the forest was so
thickly encumbered with flowering creepers and parasites as to seem one
immense bower, dense enough to exclude the sunlight and make a perpetual
twilight underneath. The higher slopes were clad with pine-trees, having
long thin needles, which hung from their boughs like fringes of green
hair, and bushy shrubs which reminded me of heaths. Above these,
enormous ferns with fronds twenty or thirty feet in length, and thickets
draped in variegated mosses were thriving in the spray of a thousand
slender cataracts which poured from the brink of the precipitous crags
on the summit of the mountain.

Seen from a distance, the cliffs appeared of a ruddy tint, but on coming
closer we found this was due to myriads of huge lichens of a deep
crimson and orange, and that the natural colours of the rock, vermilion
and blue, lemon, yellow, purple, and olive green, almost vied with those
of the forest lower down the steep.

We glided over the crest at a point where it was almost free of cloud,
and were astonished to find it carved by the weather into the most
fantastic shapes, rudely imitating the colossal figures of men and
animals, or the towers and turrets of ruined castles. After the novelty
of this goblin architecture had passed, however, its effect was somewhat
dreary. The wind, moaning through the lifeless aisles and crannies of
the dripping rocks, the rolling mist and shuddering pools of water,
induced a sense of loneliness and depression. The revulsion in our
feelings was therefore all the greater when the car suddenly escaped
from this height of desolation, and a magnificent prospect burst upon
our view.

An immense valley seemed to lie far beneath us, but it was really a
table-land of hills, rocks, and mountains, shaggy w