. The earth and its inhabitants ... Geography. THE BASIN OF THE MIDDLE ELBE. 291 is in Saxony that the last cromlechs of Central Europe are met with, and only on reaching the Crimea do we once more find examples of these ancient funereal monuments. The rivers and rivulets rising on the Erzgebirge have scooped themselves out deep channels, and flow through picturesque valleys bounded by steep cliffs. In the east, where the Elbe escapes from Bohemia, the sandstone, exposed to the action of water and the weather, forms huge blocks of astonishing regularit}'. The cliffs rising above the Elbe almos
. The earth and its inhabitants ... Geography. THE BASIN OF THE MIDDLE ELBE. 291 is in Saxony that the last cromlechs of Central Europe are met with, and only on reaching the Crimea do we once more find examples of these ancient funereal monuments. The rivers and rivulets rising on the Erzgebirge have scooped themselves out deep channels, and flow through picturesque valleys bounded by steep cliffs. In the east, where the Elbe escapes from Bohemia, the sandstone, exposed to the action of water and the weather, forms huge blocks of astonishing regularit}'. The cliffs rising above the Elbe almost look like walls constructed by the hand of man. At one spot a huge bastion, joined to the plateau by a narrow neck of land, juts out towards the river like a cyclopean wall, whilst elsewhere the rock has been completely broken up, its fragments being scattered over the Fig. 166.—Density of Population in the Kingdom of Saxony. Scale 1 : 2,300, Inhabitants to a Square Mile sa 52 - lOi tOi-155 (IS5-S07 207-21)0 200-311 sei-iU Oiei-il valley. Many of the rocks are grotesquely shaped. One of them, the Konigstein, is crowned by a fortress absolutely impregnable. Another, the Lilienstein, occupies a peninsula on the left bank of the river, and forms perhaps the most beautiful feature of what is not very appropriately termed Saxon Switzerland. Some of the rocks have the shape of obelisks, one of the most curious of these being the Prebischer Kegel, a wonderful pile commanding a wide horizon of woods and rocks. The Bastei, to the east of Wehlen, is no less remarkable. The cliffs along the Elbe above Pirna are being actively quarried, and the stone is exported as far as Hamburg, which to a large extent is built with it. Quite recently a huge mass of rock, 2G0 feet in height, which had been undermined by the quarrymen, tumbled into the river, and intenuptcd its. Please note that these images are extracted from scanned page images that may have been digitally enhanced for readab
Size: 2083px × 1199px
Photo credit: © The Book Worm / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
Keywords: ., bookcentury1800, bookdecade18, booksubjectgeography, bookyear1883
