Through An Avenue In The Rolling Nimbus, We Could
Trace The Long Courses Of Fiumaras, And Below, Where Mist Did Not Obstruct
The Sight, The Tawny Plains, Cut With Watercourses Glistening White, Shone
In Their Eternal Summer.
Shortly after 10 A.M., we resumed our march, and began the descent of the
Ghauts by a ravine to which the guide gave the name of 'Kadar.' No sandy
watercourse, the 'Pass' of this barbarous land, here facilitates the
travellers' advance:
The rapid slope of the hill presents a succession of
blocks and boulders piled one upon the other in rugged steps, apparently
impossible to a laden camel. This ravine, the Splugen of Somaliland, led
us, after an hour's ride, to the Wady Duntu, a gigantic mountain-cleft
formed by the violent action of torrents. The chasm winds abruptly between
lofty walls of syenite and pink granite, glittering with flaky mica, and
streaked with dykes and veins of snowy quartz: the strata of the
sandstones that here and there projected into the bed were wonderfully
twisted around a central nucleus, as green boughs might be bent about a
tree. Above, the hill-tops towered in the air, here denuded of vegetable
soil by the heavy monsoon, there clothed from base to brow with gum trees,
whose verdure was delicious to behold. The channel was now sandy, then
flagged with limestone in slippery sheets, or horrid with rough boulders:
at times the path was clear and easy; at others, a precipice of twenty or
thirty feet, which must be a little cataract after rain, forced us to
fight our way through the obstinate thorns that defended some spur of
ragged hill.
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