Midst the Wild Carpathians

by Mór Jókai

That stream is the Rima.

In the dim, dismal distance still higher mountains appear, from which the stream plunges down in a snow-white torrent. The morning mists exaggerate the magic remoteness of the scene, and when at last you have reached the extremest point of that remoteness, it is only to see before you a still more awful expanse, still more desolate mountain ranges, forming as it were an immense and uninterrupted ladder up to heaven.

The Rima burrows in every direction among these primeval mountains. She alone is bold enough to force her way through this wild rocky labyrinth. Sometimes she plunges down from the granite terraces with a far-resounding din, dissolving into a white, cloudy spray, in which the sunbeams paint an eternal rainbow, which spans the velvet-green margins of the abyss like a fairy bridge. A moss-clad rock projects from the midst of the waterfall, dividing it into two, and from the moss-clad rock wild roses look over into the dizzying, tumbling rapids below. Far away down, the vagrant stream is hemmed in between basalt rocks; the twofold echo changes its monotonous, muffled roar into melancholy music; its transparent, crystal waters appear black from the colour of their stony bed, wherein rosy trout and sprightly water-snakes, like silver ribbons, disport themselves; then, escaping from its brief constraint, it dashes onwards from crag to crag, angrily scourging a huge mass of rock which once, in flood-time, it swept into its bed from a distance of many miles, and which, after the next thaw or rainfall, it will hurl a thousand fathoms deeper into the rock-environed valley.

Higher and higher we mount. The oaks and beeches fall behind us; the pines and firs begin. The horizon opens out ever wider and wider. The transparent mists which have hitherto veiled the heights are left behind in the depths. The little green patches of valley are scarcely visible through the opal atmosphere, and the hilly woodlands have dwindled into dark specks; only their outlines, gold and lilac in the rays of the rising sun, are still distinguishable.

And before us the mountains still rise higher and higher. One feels tempted to scale these fresh giants also, in order to find out whether there is really any end to them. Now too even the Rima has forsaken us. Deep down below, we perceive a round, dark-blue lakelet, enclosed on all sides by steep rocks, on the mirror-like surface of which white swans are bathing beneath the shadows of the pines dependent over the water's edge. In the midst of this lakelet, the source of the Rima tosses and tumbles, casting its bubbling crystal fathoms high, and keeping the lakelet in perpetual ebullition, as if some spirit were trying to raise up the whole lake with his head.

And yet another mountain range starts up before our eyes, covered with thick fir-woods, though nothing else will grow on the steep ridge, which is covered along its whole length by masses of rock piled one on the top of the other. Nowhere does a single green speck meet the eye.

Having scaled these heights also, we naturally fancy that at last we have reached the highest point, when suddenly, high above the dark fir forests, a white giant emerges, and before the eyes of the wearied mountaineer rise the lofty distant peaks of the Silver Alps, representing the unattainable with their towering, snowy pyramids.

Here we pause.

All along the mountain ridge, standing out the more distinctly for the great distance, meanders a footpath, disappearing among the pine forests at one point and re-emerging at another, thereby showing that some one must dwell here in the wilderness, a circumstance the more startling as, up to this point, the region has seemed altogether uninhabited, while beyond it shimmer the still more inhospitable snowy mountains.

From the top of this peak one sees hundreds and hundreds of mountains and valleys exactly resembling one another. The eye grows weary of regarding them, and so long as the sun's rays strike obliquely over the region, suffusing it with a golden mist, one can barely distinguish the separate parts of the oppressively sublime panorama.