The Southern States, March, 1894: An illustrated monthly magazine devoted to the SouthVarious
History
The Southern States, March, 1894: An illustrated monthly magazine devoted to the South
Various
Agriculture -- Southern States -- Periodicals; Southern States -- Industries -- Periodicals; Southern States -- Periodicals
or dyspeptic man or woman soon gets ashamed, in such ablution and
bibulation, of racking muscles and azure imps. By what volcanic agency
this phenomenon occurs we can only conjecture. The probability is that
the central fires are nearer than usual to the surface, or that the
boiling waters that can ordinarily be reached by hard, pertinacious
mining toil, thousands of feet deep, find here some propulsion and
channel of their own and need only a touch to make them disclose their
virtues. If they do not “create a spirit under the ribs of death,”
they spur on an appetite that may have lost all zest, and when a man is
impatient for his meals and partakes of them with satisfaction, disease
has small hold upon him.
[Illustration: THE SWANNANOA.]
One of the weird sights of this region is a mountain fire. On a dark
night such conflagrations are, of course, more spectacular, and when
belts of flame cover large areas and are detached fiercely from one
another, the resemblance to Kilauea, the burning lake of the Sandwich
Island, is startling. In these days of Hawaiian perturbation and
discussion one could easily imagine that he was in the Eden Isle of the
Pacific ocean, and might look for dusky maidens darting by on horseback
with red hybiscus flowers blushing in their lustrous black hair.
This enchanted region is reached by the Richmond & Danville railroad,
whose lines furnish approach also to many other places in the alpine
location of South Carolina and Georgia that merit equal attention
with these scenes so imperfectly described or sketched from memory.
Cæsar’s Head, near Greenville, is a genuine curiosity, and even the
old European or Rocky Mountain traveller admits that the prospect from
this precipitous elevation is awesome and inspirational. At the old
town of Clarksville, in North Georgia, the scenery is transcendent.
Once you have seen Mount Yonah you will never forget it, and when will
ever fade from your recollection the prodigious carving, by witchery in
distant perspective, of the Cherokee chief stretched gigantically upon
his sky-line bier? From the porches of Roseneath villa you best discern
this strange conformation. There he extends, in tremendous dimensions,
graven on the horizon, a distinct and spectral Indian shape, with
drooping plumes. The people thereabout know him familiarly as
Skiahjagustah. You may, in quest of gold, for the region is full of it,
seek to penetrate this mysterious personage, but he will vanish as you
approach him, transformed to common rock and tree and shrub, and yet
reappear by enchantment when you go back to Roseneath and summon him
from beyond the Soquee river. Here asthma has no clutch and rheumatism
ceases to torment. A German workman came here crippled from New Jersey,
and presently grew perfectly well in this climate. He is busily at work
in wood and iron in a shop of his own, and happy in possession of a
little farm, which has a famous vineyard like unto those which gem the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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