looking vault, and
gave forth a kind of long, sad wail, while at either side their
straight slender trunks formed, as it were, an army of organ-pipes,
from which seemed to issue that monotonous music of the wind through
the tree-tops.

After three hours' walking there was an opening in this row of tangled
branches. Here and there an enormous pine-parasol, separated from the
others, opening like an immense umbrella, displayed its dome of dark
green; then, all of a sudden, we gained the boundary of the forest,
some hundreds of meters below the defile which leads into the wild
valley of Niolo.

On the two projecting heights which commanded a view of this pass,
some old trees grotesquely twisted, seemed to have mounted with
painful efforts, like scouts who had started in advance of the
multitude heaped together in the rear. When we turned round, we saw
the entire forest stretched beneath our feet, like a gigantic basin of
verdure, whose edges, which seemed to reach the sky, were composed of
bare rocks shutting in on every side.

We resumed our walk, and, ten minutes later, we found ourselves in the
defile.

Then I beheld an astonishing landscape. Beyond another forest, a
valley, but a valley such as I had never seen before, a solitude of
stone ten leagues long, hollowed out between two high mountains,
without a field or a tree to be seen. This was the Niolo valley, the
fatherland of Corsican liberty, the inaccessible citadel, from which
the invaders had never been able to drive out the mountaineers.

My companion said to me: "Is it here, too, that all our bandits have
taken refuge?"

Ere long we were at the further end of this chasm so wild, so
inconceivably beautiful.

Not a blade of grass, not a plant--nothing but granite. As far as our
eyes could reach, we saw in front of us a desert of glittering stone,
heated like an oven by a burning sun, which seemed to hang for that
very purpose right above the gorge. When we raised our eyes towards
the crests, we stood dazzled and stupefied by what we saw. They looked
red and notched like festoons of coral, for all the summits are made
of porphyry; and the sky overhead seemed violet, lilac, discolored by
the vicinity of these strange mountains. Lower down the granite was of
scintillating gray, and under our feet it seemed rasped, pounded; we
were walking over shining powder. At our right, along a long and
irregular course, a tumultuous torrent ran with a continuous roar.