From these (I see such a picture even as I
write, seated on the stone steps in the middle of a mountain path), at
once united and peculiarly distinct, rise five masses with rugged
crests, rough, and cut into shady hollows on the sides, a faint pale
aureola from the sun on the mists rising over the summits and sharp
outlines. Looking to the north, an immense curved line shows itself,
growing ever greater, opening like the arch of a gigantic bridge, and
binding this first group to a second, more complicated, each peak of
which has a form of its own, and does in some sort as it pleases without
troubling itself about its neighbor. The most remarkable point about
these mountains is the life they seem to possess. It is an incredible
confusion. Angles are thrown fantastically by some mad geometer, it
would seem. Splendid banyan trees shelter one after toiling up the
unending steps, and dotted over the landscape, indiscriminately in
magnificent picturesqueness, are pretty farmhouses nestling almost out
of sight in groves of sacred trees. Oftentimes perpendicular mountains
stand sheer up for three thousand feet or more, their sides to the very
summits ablaze with color coming from the smiling face of sunny Nature,
in spots at times where only a twelve-inch cultivation is possible.
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