all their own, inherent in their
topography. Apparently an almost level stretch of timbered country
along the little railroad, in reality this level is the plateau top of
a great rock wall, a kind of huge mesa extending north and south. If
you walk to the edge, you discover that it suddenly falls away with
startling abruptness, sometimes in sheer descents of several hundred
feet till the top of the ancient shale pile is reached (now covered
deep with soil) and then dropping away more gradually with that lovely
curve of debris. But nowhere is this Palisade-like wall continuous,
and here is where the southern Cumberlands get their unique flavor.
The descending water from the plateau top has eroded deep into the
precipice every mile or even every half mile, each brook in the
course of ages eating far back into the mountain mass, forming a
V-shaped depression called a cove, and between two coves thus formed
is a reverse [symbol: upside-down V], called a point, always,
naturally, composed of the hardest rock, and not infrequently ending
in a literal point so sharp that it is like a vast granite bowsprit
thrust out into the green plains far below, terminating in a sheer
precipice of several hundred feet. Roughly, then, you may visualize
this section of the Cumberlands as a giant double-edged saw, a
thousand feet thick, laid down across the State, each tooth a "point,"
each V between the teeth a "cove." Standing far out on one of these
rock bowsprits, in the soft, hazy air of the southern mountains, you
look over the far valley lands below, you look north and south at the
other thrusting bowsprits growing bluer and more mysterious as they
recede, you look to left and right down into the timbered green
lushness of the coves, where invisible water tinkles.

But the simile of the saw is only a rough one, after all, because
erosion is never mathematical, some coves have bitten back far deeper
than others, side coves have developed, and if you follow down the
mystery of some brown brook, Little Fiery Gizzard Creek, let us say,
for love of the name, you may very soon precipitate yourself into such
a maze of coves, such a tangle of tough, tearing shrubbery (the term
"laurel hell" is the mountaineer as realist), that you will regret,
perhaps, the day you abandoned what in this region is euphemistically
called a road. But you will hardly forget the view from some inland
point, where you look, not out over the Tennessee plains, but ove