Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 71.djvu/573

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gray and green fields, was seen close at hand, the road began a descent, and, in an instant, the portentous gateway of the Almannaja, like an Egyptian façade loomed gloomily in our path. We moved slowly—awed into temporary silence—down the gradually sloping road between the frowning walls, over a bridge spanning a brawling torrent by a clear, deep pool, and before us, on a ragged plain, which held a fortuitous sort of herbage, fighting its way against the discouragements of a stony soil, was the Walhalla Hotel. To me, at least, it assumed all the radiance of that mythical paradise.

The next day was brilliantly clear, and we studied our locality. It presented a wonderful geological phenomenon. It was a broad valley of depression, between mountains, rifted by long parallel chasms, which crossed it in the direction of its longer diameter, and which were easily descried from a considerable distance, by the furrows they presented in the landscape, by reason of the unequal elevation of their bounding walls. There were some eight of these remarkable fissures—the sundered seams in one vast flooring of erupted rock—and many of them, as that one in which the ancient Logberg stood, contained softly flowing streams of water.