What an awful spectacle that vast stretch of burning forest must have presented! We shall quote from Headley, who witnessed such a scene in these mountains: "One night the whole mountain was wrapped in a fiery mantle, a mighty bosom of fire from which rose waving columns and lofty turrets of flame. Trees a hundred feet high and five and six and eight feet in circumference, were on fire from the root to the top. Vast pyramids of flame, now surging in eddies of air that caught them, now bending as if about to yield the struggle, then lifting superior to the foe and dying, martyr-like, in the vast furnace. Shorn of their glory, their flashing, trembling forms stood crisping and writhing in the blaze till, weary of their long suffering, they threw themselves with a sudden and hurried sweep on the funeral pile around. From the noble pine to the bending sprout, the trees were aflame, while the crackling underbrush seemed a fiery network cast over the prostrate forms of the monarchs of the forest. When the fire caught a dry stump, it ran up the huge trunk like a serpent, and coiling around the withered branches, shot out its fiery tongue as if in mad joy over the raging element below; while ever and anon came a crash that reverberated far away in the gorges--the crash of falling trees, at the overthrow of which there went up a cloud of sparks and cinders and ashes. Sweeping along its terrible path, the tramp of that conflagration filled the air with an uproar like the bursting of billows on a rocky shore." Across a narrow valley gigantic boulders seemed to have accumulated and formed masses that appeared to be slowly creeping downward. Farther away we beheld the serrated mountains breaking into the wildest confusion of pinnacles, which rose above the forest and relieved their masses of vivid green tints like ruined castles along the Rhine, clothing them with an atmosphere of age. Far up as the eye could reach, the broken rocks were piled in huge chaos. "Here as your eye sweeps over these fragments of a former earthquake, your imagination recalls that remote period when the mountains were split like lightning- riven oaks, and the great peaks swayed like trees in a blast and the roar of a thousand storms rolled away from the yawning gulf, into which precipices and forests went down with a deafening crash as of a falling world."