Where’er I chanc’d to roam!
We stood on the verge of a tremendous precipice, eight hundred feet in height, and overhanging the Elbe below. Though its brow is fringed with an iron ballustrade, I observed that very few ventured to look over the frightful bourne,
“Lest the brain turn and the deficient sight
Topple down headlong.”
In the opposite direction, rises one of the most singular scenes that ever opened on the human eye. The billows of an angry ocean suddenly converted into stone, while agitated by a furious hurricane, might convey some, but a very imperfect, idea of this astonishing locality. The fractured rocks, though all presenting the stratifications so often mentioned, and most of them still horizontal, assume almost every shape and form that imagination bodies forth in the autumnal clouds that range themselves along the western horizon, as the cortege of a setting sun, on a beautiful evening. Pyramids, cliffs, spires, columns, ruins, cupolas, turrets, battlements, castles, colossal statues and fantastic figures—of everything, in short, which a fertile fancy can conjure up in the animate or inanimate world.[86]
After the first emotions of surprize and astonishment have subsided, we begin to ask ourselves what convulsion of Nature could have produced this scene of devastation, destruction, and dislocation? Was it an earthquake?—a volcano?—or a deluge? Coupling this last idea with the acknowledged fact that all these fractured rocks were once a series of level and solid strata at the bottom of the ocean, the remarkable expression in Holy Writ rushed on the mind—“And the fountains of the great deep were broken up.” Whether this indescribable scene of disruption and dilapidation was produced by any one of those three causes, or by all in succession, must for ever remain a secret sealed from human ken,—but it is abundantly evident, from the vast masses of debris along the banks of the river, that the winds and rains are constantly disintegrating the softer materials of this “Mer de Pierres,” and carrying them down towards the stream of the Elbe, which acts its part in conveying them to the bed of the great Northern Ocean, there to form new deposits, preparatory to some other revolution in our planet, which may once more raise the bed of the sea into terra firma—and overwhelm our mountains and plains in unfathomable depths of the vast watery element!
Various paths are formed among the intricacies of the rocks here, and seats formed for contemplating
“Craggs, knolls, and mounds confusedly hurl’d,
The fragments of an earlier world.”