Page:Life in the Open Air.djvu/370

hill is in shadow, but not consigned to utter blackness, and maltreated with coarse neglect. You may perceive or divine every line of sinking surface, and every time-worn channel converging to the gulf in its front. You may feel that it bears up a multitudinous forest on its isolated crest, where fires that sweep the mountain moors, or “paramos,” have not reached. Level with this compact pyramid extends to the left a bench of rocky plateau, where we can gird ourselves for our sturdy task. Then, as we toil resolutely up, we find that earth was not at play when this Titanic mass was reared. Here are mountain upon mountain; crag climbing on the shoulders of crag; plain and slope, and “huddling slant” and precipice; furrow, chasm, plunging hollow, quebrada and abyss; solitary knolls, groups of allied hills, long sierras marked on their sheer flanks with cleavage and rock-slides; conical mounds, walls of stem frontage; myriad tokens of primeval convulsions; proofs everywhere of change, building, razing, upheaval, sinking, and deliberate crumbling away, and how new ruin restores the strong lines that old ruin weakened. Yet, with all this complex action and episode, there is still one steady movement upward of this bold earth-born Hyperion higher toward the masterful heights, with stronger step and larger leap as he learns the power of sustained impulse, and mounts nearer and nearer the region of final mysterious battle in clouds and darkness, on the verge of