- end_line
- 15277
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:48:52.924Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 15218
- text
- "The aspiring amaranth, every year it climbs and adds new terraces to
its sway! The immortal amaranth, it will not die, but last year's
flowers survive to this! The terraced pastures grow glittering white,
and in warm June still show like banks of snow:--fit token of the
sterileness the amaranth begets! Then free us from the amaranth, good
lady, or be pleased to abate our rent!"
Now, on a somewhat nearer approach, the precipice did not belie its
purple promise from the manorial piazza--that sweet imposing purple
promise, which seemed fully to vindicate the Bunyanish old title
originally bestowed;--but showed the profuse aerial foliage of a hanging
forest. Nevertheless, coming still more nigh, long and frequent rents
among the mass of leaves revealed horrible glimpses of dark-dripping
rocks, and mysterious mouths of wolfish caves. Struck by this most
unanticipated view, the tourist now quickened his impulsive steps to
verify the change by coming into direct contact with so chameleon a
height. As he would now speed on, the lower ground, which from the
manor-house piazza seemed all a grassy level, suddenly merged into a
very long and weary acclivity, slowly rising close up to the precipice's
base; so that the efflorescent grasses rippled against it, as the
efflorescent waves of some great swell or long rolling billow ripple
against the water-line of a steep gigantic war-ship on the sea. And, as
among the rolling sea-like sands of Egypt, disordered rows of broken
Sphinxes lead to the Cheopian pyramid itself; so this long acclivity was
thickly strewn with enormous rocky masses, grotesque in shape, and with
wonderful features on them, which seemed to express that slumbering
intelligence visible in some recumbent beasts--beasts whose intelligence
seems struck dumb in them by some sorrowful and inexplicable spell.
Nevertheless, round and round those still enchanted rocks, hard by their
utmost rims, and in among their cunning crevices, the misanthropic
hill-scaling goat nibbled his sweetest food; for the rocks, so barren in
themselves, distilled a subtile moisture, which fed with greenness all
things that grew about their igneous marge.
Quitting those recumbent rocks, you still ascended toward the hanging
forest, and piercing within its lowermost fringe, then suddenly you
stood transfixed, as a marching soldier confounded at the sight of an
impregnable redoubt, where he had fancied it a practicable vault to his
courageous thews. Cunningly masked hitherto, by the green tapestry of
the interlacing leaves, a terrific towering palisade of dark mossy
massiness confronted you; and, trickling with unevaporable moisture,
distilled upon you from its beetling brow slow thunder-showers of
water-drops, chill as the last dews of death. Now you stood and shivered
in that twilight, though it were high noon and burning August down the
meads. All round and round, the grim scarred rocks rallied and
re-rallied themselves; shot up, protruded, stretched, swelled, and
eagerly reached forth; on every side bristlingly radiating with a
hideous repellingness. Tossed, and piled, and indiscriminate among
these, like bridging rifts of logs up-jammed in alluvial-rushing streams
of far Arkansas: or, like great masts and yards of overwhelmed fleets
hurled high and dashed amain, all splintering together, on hovering
ridges of the Atlantic sea,--you saw the melancholy trophies which the
North Wind, championing the unquenchable quarrel of the Winter, had
wrested from the forests, and dismembered them on their own chosen
battle-ground, in barbarous disdain. 'Mid this spectacle of wide and
wanton spoil, insular noises of falling rocks would boomingly explode
upon the silence and fright all the echoes, which ran shrieking in and
out among the caves, as wailing women and children in some assaulted
town.
- title
- Chunk 2