Penrith looks as a child's toy village; and Windsor and Richmond, far away, are but indistinct white dots. All quiet, tame, prosperous, and very simply beautiful below; all above and beyond wild and rugged, and, in the commercial sense, unprofitable. As marvellous a contrast as could be imagined, the beginning and the end apparently of new orders, the results of different forces, the work of the earth spent in opposite moods. One must needs marvel in contrasting such scenes, and more profound becomes the marvel and the wonderment, as with every mile a vaster, wilder, grander region is found. Cliff-faces leagues long, and a thousand feet perpendicular; huge basins, like veritable gulfs in space, where a firmament of blue gathers between the rocky mountain head and the forest growth below, isolated rocks that dwarf all monuments reared in any city of old; deep calling unto deep in innumerable waterfalls, and through all the summer months frequent thunder, as if the spirits who had wrought their marvels below were still toiling at some other labour in mid-air. The meanest mind becomes expanded in wonder, and the least philosophical instinct begins to speculate and inquire. There has, indeed, been much deep speculation, much zealous and competent inquiry as to the phenomena of these mountains, and the startling contrast upon their southern front. Tennison-Woods studied and wrote of them, and more recently Dr. J. E. Taylor has, in a few graphic sentences, expressed his opinions of the geological changes which have taken place, particularly of the changes and causes which have produced the fertile plains and the hills, whose chief present product is ozone, with the river rolling between. Having touched lightly upon the facts generally known of the Hawkesbury sandstone formation, overlaid on a great breadth of the county of Cumberland by the Wianamatta shales, he says:—
'But the continuity of both the Hawkesbury sandstones and the overlying and usually accompanying Wianamatta shales is interfered with on a magnificent scale at Emu Plains. The entire country from this point to Sydney Heads has been slowly let down by one of those great earth movements known as a "downthrow fault." The downthrow was not the work of one single act of disturbance—it went on for ages. Meantime the Wianamatta shales, which overlaid the Hawkesbury sandstones of the Blue Mountains, were denuded off, or nearly so, for there is only a small patch now remaining, right on the top, after we have ascended by the first zigzag, to show that they were once continuous with those of the plains more than 2,000 feet below.'
There is infinite variety in the mountains. Even though wearied of the grandeur and wildness of the gorges, the vastness of the basins, whose great forest carpets appear but as robes of green evenly spread, or the grotesquely piled rocks, and the bold and beautiful flora of the table-lands and mountain heads, the traveller need not hasten back to town, imagining he has seen all. Let him find his way down from Blackheath to the entrance of a valley known as the Mermaid's Cave—a great grey rock that juts out and almost blocks the valley, dividing a somewhat arid gorge above from a lovely dell below. He passes through a rock-cleft, and there before him is a scene beautiful as new. There indeed,—
'A vale of beauty, lovelier Than all the valleys of the greater hills.'
Yes, this is the fairy land of the mountains. Tall, feathery-foliaged, golden-blossomed wattles rise side by side with the olive-green turpentines, and through them runs the mountain brook in cataract after cataract. Upon the edge of the wattle-grove the tree-ferns grow, and beyond them is a carpet of bracken—a broad slope at the hill-foot, rich dark green with tips of pink, and shadows and hollows of russet and brown, where new growths display yet their dainty shades, or dead leaves have taken the rich autumnal brown. There is deep, grateful shade here in the heat of the day, for no sunbeam penetrates the roof of wattle and palm-like fern, and the water seems to bring down coolness from its higher springs.
Zigzag Railway in the Blue Mountains.
A bolder valley, one of the great gorges of the world, is the Lithgow, the road to the western slopes and the long-locked interior. It was down this great ravine that the first explorers looked awe-stricken at the marvellous road that nature had prepared for them; and who can gaze without awe and wonder and broadening conceptions of nature and nature's work as he looks down that entrance way to Australia's heart, and realizes the manner and the period of its making? The ages that have clothed the mountain sides with forests are but as seconds to years by comparison with those which have worn the world's crust away, and by comparison with these stupendous results of natural forces, what pigmy work appears the zigzag down which goes the inland train! This Lithgow Vale is usually considered the western limit of the Blue Mountains, though in their further northward range, notably about Capertee on the Mudgee line, they rise again and display forms of rugged grandeur.