Musing on these memories of the past, we find ourselves at last at the
top of the slope, nearly two thousand feet above the sea, and discover
that from this lofty summit, which is known as Slieve League, the
ground plunges down on the other side in a succession of precipices
into the Atlantic Ocean, which stretches from the far western horizon
up to the very base of the crags beneath our feet. We have in truth
been climbing a mountain whereof one-half has been cut away by the sea.
What a picture of decay here presents itself! We peer over the verge
of the cliffs, still wrapped in their morning shadows, and mark how
peak, ridge, and wall of flinty quartzite, glowing in tints of orange,
yellow, and red, uprear themselves from the face of the declivity,
like the muscles on the limb of some sculptured Hercules, as if the
mountain had gathered up its whole strength and knit its frame together
to defy the fiercest assaults of the elements. But look how every
crag is splintered, how every jutting buttress is rent and creviced,
how every ledge is strewn with blocks that have fallen from the naked
wall above it! If we detach one of these loosened blocks and set it in
downward motion, we may watch it plunge into the abyss, flash from crag
to crag, career down the screes of rubbish and make no pause until, if
it survive so far, it dashes into the surge below. What we can thus
carelessly do in a few moments is done deliberately every winter by
the hand of Nature. Slowly but ceaselessly this vast seawall, swept by
Atlantic storm, sapped by frost, soaked with rain, dried and beaten
by sun and wind, is being battered down under the fire of Nature's
resistless artillery.
So far the scene is one that requires no special acquaintance with
science for its appreciation. The man of literature, who may most
disparage the man of science, may well affirm that here they meet on
common ground and have equal powers of reception and enjoyment. Nor
will he be gainsaid if he claims that for the enjoyment of the distant
view he is likewise quite as well equipped as the other. His eye, too,
can range over the whole glorious panorama of sea and land, across the
wide bay to the hills of Mayo, among which the noble cone of Nephin
rises like a distant Vesuvius; southward to the terraced heights of
Sligo, with their green tablelands and gleaming cliffs, which look
away to the western ocean; eastward and northward, over the billowy
sea of hills that stretch through Donegal round again westward to the
Atlantic. What is there of note in such a landscape, he may demand,
which he, ignorant of science, misses? What added pleasure, what
brighter light, can science cast over it?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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