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 with vegetation, and
flung together in riotous confusion like the billows of a raging sea.
The stupendous cliffs behind us dropped sheerly down to the level of the
plateau, some ten or twenty thousand feet below, and swept around it as