covered for its whole width by the body of the train.

On they went, suspended in mid-air at a giddy height, along interminable
balconies without parapets; and below, the cliffs dropped
avalanche-like, fell straight, bare, without a patch of vegetation or a
tree. In places they looked as if they had been split down by the blows
of an axe--huge growths of petrified wood; in others they seemed sawn
through shaley layers of slate.

And all round lay a wide amphitheatre of endless mountains, hiding the
heavens, piled one above another, barring the way to the travelling
clouds, stopping the onward march of the sky.

Some made a good show with their jagged grey crests, huge masses of
oyster shells; others, with scorched summits, like burnt pyramids of
coke, were green half-way up. These bristled with pine woods to the very
edge of the precipices, and they were scarred too with white
crosses--the high roads, dotted in places with Nuremberg dogs,
red-roofed hamlets, sheepfolds that seemed on the verge of tumbling
headlong, clinging on--how, it was impossible to guess, and flung here
and there on patches of green carpet glued on to the steep hill-sides;
while other peaks towered higher still, like vast calcined hay-cocks,
with doubtfully dead craters still brooding internal fires, and trailing
smoky clouds which, as they blew off, really seemed to be coming out of
their summits.

The landscape was ominous; the sight of it was strangely discomfiting;
perhaps because it impugned the sense of the infinite that lurks within
us. The firmament was no more than a detail, cast aside like needless
rubbish on the desert peaks of the hills. The abyss was the