Page:On the Desert - Recent Events in Egypt.djvu/106

 heads against the sky. We stood on the brow of a precipice, which might well make one shudder as he advanced to the point of the cliff, and looked over to a depth of four thousand feet.

And what at last did we gain by all this? Only the disappointment that waits on ambition? or enough to repay us for the fatigue of this tremendous climb? We saw beneath us a panorama as extensive as that seen from the Righi; only, instead of the smiling cantons of Switzerland, with green fields and waving forests and crystal lakes, we saw only the barrenness of utter desolation, yet in such awful forms as produced an impression of indescribable grandeur. All round us the horizon was piled with mountains. Indeed the whole Peninsula is a sea of mountains, in which peaks on peaks are tossed up like waves. It seems as if they had been thrown up out of a lake of fire; as if in a remote geological period, when the body of our planet was a molten mass, and material forces were acting with an intensity and violence of which we have no conception, in some tremendous convulsion the flaming crests were tossed against the sky, and then suddenly arrested by the Creator's hand, which held them fixed in their utmost wildness, so to remain forever. But it may be a question whether this jagged outline was caused by throwing up or by wearing down. My companion, surveying the scene, not "with a poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling," but with the patient observation of science, reports that "these peaks are all water-worn, the result of the gradual degradation of masses which were probably overlaid by stratified rocks, and entombed under the sea; and that after their submersion and emergence, and the wearing away of their sandstone and limestone coverings, the granite masses were splintered by lightning, shivered by frost, cracked by the heat of the sun, and worn by storms, into