s giant brethren rose out of the level prairie,
as if springing from the bed of the ocean. From their summits down to
the plain below they were involved in a mantle of clouds, in restless
motion, as if urged by strong winds. For one instant some snowy peak,
towering in awful solitude, would be disclosed to view. As the
clouds broke along the mountain, we could see the dreary forests, the
tremendous precipices, the white patches of snow, the gulfs and chasms
as black as night, all revealed for an instant, and then disappearing
from the view. One could not but recall the stanza of "Childe Harold":

Morn dawns, and with it stern Albania's hills,
Dark Suli's rocks, and Pindus' inland peak,
Robed half in mist, bedewed with snowy rills,
Array'd in many a dun and purple streak,
Arise; and, as the clouds along them break,
Disclose the dwelling of the mountaineer:
Here roams the wolf, the eagle whets his beak,
Birds, beasts of prey, and wilder men appear,
And gathering storms around convulse the closing year.

Every line save one of this description was more than verified here.
There were no "dwellings of the mountaineer" among these heights. Fierce
savages, restlessly wandering through summer and winter, alone invade
them. "Their hand is against every man, and every man's hand against
them."

On the day after, we had left the mountains at some distance. A black
cloud descended upon them, and a tremendous explosion of thunder
followed, reverberating among the precipices. In a few moments
everything grew black and the rain poured down like a cataract. We got
under an old cotton-wood tree which stood by the side of a stream, and
waited there till the rage of the torrent had passed.

The clouds opened at the point where they first had gathered, and the
whole sublime congregation of mountains was bathed at once in warm
sunshine. They seemed more like some luxurious vision of Eastern romance
than like a reality of that wilderness; all were melted together into
a soft delicious blue, as voluptuous as the sky of Naples or the
transparent sea that washes the sunny cliffs of Capri. On the left the
whole sky was still of an inky blackness; but two concentric rainbows
stood in brilliant relief against it, while far in front the ragged
cloud still streamed before the wind, and the retreating thunder
muttered angrily.

Through that afternoon and the next morning we were passing down the
ba