Romantic Corsica, wanderings in Napoleon's isle; . of dreamy man. The regionseems like a rock city of the dead, with a ghostly series ofpictures in stone on its walls which might be the workof a race ,of men from another planet. Now theretowered above me a huge mass like a petrified avalanche,robbed of its might as it rushed to destroy everything;then I could see a great balcony with a cunningly cutpulpit, whilst all around the wall was cut and carvedto look like the pipes of the organ in a vast the road became enclosed by rocks on eitherhand, sometimes it skirted the base
Romantic Corsica, wanderings in Napoleon's isle; . of dreamy man. The regionseems like a rock city of the dead, with a ghostly series ofpictures in stone on its walls which might be the workof a race ,of men from another planet. Now theretowered above me a huge mass like a petrified avalanche,robbed of its might as it rushed to destroy everything;then I could see a great balcony with a cunningly cutpulpit, whilst all around the wall was cut and carvedto look like the pipes of the organ in a vast the road became enclosed by rocks on eitherhand, sometimes it skirted the base of what might be thewall of a ruined Indian temple. Now grooved, now cor-roded, now pierced through and through, obelisks anddomes tower upwards, now fiery in colour, now dun anddreary. Here evergreen oaks have found a foothold;there the maquis subsists on a thin layer of soil. Vari-coloured mosses creep up tall, tottering spires. Sil-houettes of animals startle one at every turn and freak-like sculpture, in derisive caricature of man, holds one. BY THE GULFS OF THE WEST 279 spellbound. It is Natures nightmare in stone. A grinninghuman face leers down the valley, a great dog keeps theroadway, high up on the face of the rock is the outlineof an elephant. This great vista of unshapely masonrysometimes looks as though a modern fleet had wroughthuge havoc with its guns in a curious city of the Orient;at other parts it appears as though it had been a giantsbattlefield over which are scattered the boulders withwhich they fought, hurled from Titanic catapults. This curious eerie region, perched high up betweenthe pretty districts of Porto and Plana, is the BrokenMelody in western Corsicas hymn of beauty—a mad,unrhythmic rhapsody in rock. For three hours I wandered amongst the rocks, butthe whole thing is too vast for photography, too wildand far-flung even for the painter. All the while a sharprain fell, and, though I was soaked through and through,I found it difficult to leave the
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookdecade1900, bookpublisherlondonetctfunwin
