THE CURRAL.
The view in front was obstructed by a high ridge, of which we had nearly gained the highest point, when we left our horses, and running up a few yards of steep turf found ourselves all at once on the brink of the Curral. It is a huge valley, or rather crater, of immense depth, enclosed on all sides by a range of magnificent mountain precipices, the sides and summit of which are broken in every variety of buttress or pinnacle—now black and craggy and beetling—at other times spread with the richest green turf, and scattered with a profusion of the evergreen forest-trees, indigenous to the island; while far below, in the midst of all these horrors, smiles a fairy region of cultivation and fruitfulness, with a church and village, the white cabins of which seem half smothered in the luxuriance of their own vines and orchards.
We gazed long and eagerly at the prospect. It is not easy to give an accurate notion of its peculiar character; and even painting would but ill assist, for one of the most striking features is the great and sudden depth which you look down, the effect of which we know the pencil cannot at all convey. The side on which we stand, however, though steep, is not absolutely precipitous; on the contrary, the gradation of crag and projection, by which it descends to the bottom, is one of the finest things in the view. Close on our right a lofty peak presents its rocky face to the valley, to which it bears down in a magnificent mass, shouldering its way, as it seemed, half across it. The opposite sides appear more bare, precipitous, and lofty; and this last character is heightened by some white clouds that rest upon and conceal their summits.
Rejoining the road, we for awhile lost sight of the valley. When we again came in view of it, it was rapidly filling with clouds, but at first their interposition was hardly a disadvantage; they gave a vague indefinite grandeur to the cliffs and mountains, which seemed to rise one knew not from what depth, and lose their summits in regions beyond our ken. The breaks, too, that occurred in this shrouding of the scene, showed fragments of it with strange effect—till at length the whole hollow filled, and presented a uniform sea of vapour.
Rambles in Madeira.