Fierce savages, restlessly wandering through summer and winter, alone
invade them. "Their hand is against every man, and every man's hand
against them."
On the day after, we had left the mountains at some distance. A
black cloud descended upon them, and a tremendous explosion of
thunder followed, reverberating among the precipices. In a few
moments everything grew black and the rain poured down like a
cataract. We got under an old cotton-wood tree which stood by the
side of a stream, and waited there till the rage of the torrent had
passed.
The clouds opened at the point where they first had gathered, and the
whole sublime congregation of mountains was bathed at once in warm
sunshine. They seemed more like some luxurious vision of Eastern
romance than like a reality of that wilderness; all were melted
together into a soft delicious blue, as voluptuous as the sky of
Naples or the transparent sea that washes the sunny cliffs of Capri.
On the left the whole sky was still of an inky blackness; but two
concentric rainbows stood in brilliant relief against it, while far
in front the ragged cloud still streamed before the wind, and the
retreating thunder muttered angrily.
Through that afternoon and the next morning we were passing down the
banks of the stream called La Fontaine qui Bouille, from the boiling
spring whose waters flow into it.
