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. [Illustration: 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. [Illustration: FISH RIVER CAVE.]