I Moved Forward, Determined To
Explore The Mystery To The Bottom, And Soon Became Involved Among The
Pines.
The genius of the place exercised a strange influence upon my
mind.
Its faculties were stimulated into extraordinary activity, and
as I passed along many half-forgotten incidents, and the images of
persons and things far distant, rose rapidly before me with
surprising distinctness. In that perilous wilderness, eight hundred
miles removed beyond the faintest vestige of civilization, the scenes
of another hemisphere, the seat of ancient refinement, passed before
me more like a succession of vivid paintings than any mere dreams of
the fancy. I saw the church of St. Peter's illumined on the evening
of Easter Day, the whole majestic pile, from the cross to the
foundation stone, penciled in fire and shedding a radiance, like the
serene light of the moon, on the sea of upturned faces below. I saw
the peak of Mount Etna towering above its inky mantle of clouds and
lightly curling its wreaths of milk-white smoke against the soft sky
flushed with the Sicilian sunset. I saw also the gloomy vaulted
passages and the narrow cells of the Passionist convent where I once
had sojourned for a few days with the fanatical monks, its pale,
stern inmates in their robes of black, and the grated window from
whence I could look out, a forbidden indulgence, upon the melancholy
Coliseum and the crumbling ruins of the Etennal City. The mighty
glaciers of the Splugen too rose before me, gleaming in the sun like
polished silver, and those terrible solitudes, the birthplace of the
Rhine, where bursting from the bowels of its native mountains, it
lashes and foams down the rocky abyss into the little valley of
Andeer.
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