In less than three hours from the city, the bare peak rose directly before us—a pinnacled platform of rock scarcely twenty feet square, separated from the general mass by a broad and deep fissure, over which a rude wooden bridge is thrown. As the peak has been known to be frequently struck by lightning, it is supposed that this chasm was originally caused by a thunderbolt. A rail, supported by iron posts soldered into the solid granite, furnishes a guard on three sides to the precipices descending perpendicularly from them.
The panorama commanded by it, embracing as it does all the imagery that combines in securing to Rio de Janeiro its world-wide celebrity for wonderful beauty, could not fail—under the advantages of the brilliant atmosphere, bright sunshine and lengthened shadows in which we gazed on it—to meet our expectations. The entire city and its suburbs lay at our feet; and, like a map, the bay—near a hundred miles in circuit—its many picturesque headlands and islands and the Organ Mountains and chain along the coast, the peak of Tejuca, the Sugar Loaf reduced to insignificant dimensions, the Gavia, the outer islets and the illimitable sea! The silence one is disposed to keep, in view of such a scene from such a point, best expresses perhaps the kind of admiration felt. Had Bryant in an inspiration of his genius stood with us, he might possibly have given utterance to a description more sublime but to none more graphic or minutely true to the scene, than one already recorded by his pen—
“Steep is the western side, shaggy and wild,
With mossy trees, and pinnacles of flint,
And many a hanging crag. But to the East,
Sheer to the vale, go down the bare old cliffs—
Huge pillars, that in middle heaven up bear
Their weather-beaten capitals, here dark
With moss, the growth of centuries, and there
Of chalky whiteness, where the thunder bolt