The Corsican Bandit

The road, with a gentle winding, reached the middle of the forest. The
huge pine-trees spread above our heads a mournful-looking vault, and
gave forth a kind of long, sad wail, while at either side their
straight, slender trunks formed, as it were, an army of organ-pipes,
from which seemed to issue the low, monotonous music of the wind through
the tree-tops.

After three hours' walking there was an opening in this row of tangled
branches. Here and there an enormous pine-parasol, separated from the
others, opening like an immense umbrella, displayed its dome of dark
green; then, all of a sudden, we gained the boundary of the forest, some
hundreds of meters below the defile which leads into the wild valley of
Niolo.

On the two projecting heights which commanded a view of this pass, some
old trees, grotesquely twisted, seemed to have mounted with painful
efforts, like scouts who had started in advance of the multitude heaped
together in the rear. When we turned round we saw the entire forest
stretched beneath our feet, like a gigantic basin of verdure, whose
edges, which seemed to reach the sky, were composed of bare racks
shutting in on every side.

We resumed our walk, and, ten minutes later, we found ourselves in the
defile.

Then I beheld an astonishing landscape. Beyond another forest, a valley,
but a valley such as I had never seen before, a solitude of stone ten
leagues long, hollowed out between two high mountains, without a field
or a tree to be seen. This was the Niolo valley, the fatherland of
Corsican liberty, the inaccessible citadel, from which the invaders had
never been able to drive out the mountaineers.

My companion said to me: "It is here, that all our bandits have taken
refuge."

Ere long we were at the further end of this chasm, so wild, so
inconceivably beautiful.

Not a blade of grass, not a plant--nothing but granite. As far as our
eyes could reach we saw in front of us a desert of glittering stone,
heated like an oven by a burning sun which seemed to hang for that very
purpose right above the gorge. When we raised our eyes toward the crests
we stood dazzled and stupefied by what we saw. They looked red and
notched like festoons of coral, for all the summits are made of
porphyry; and the sky overhead seemed violet, lilac, discolored by the
vicinity of these strange mountains. Lower down the granite was of
scintillating gray, and under our feet it seemed rasped, pounded; we
were walking over shining powder. At our right, along a long and
irregular course, a tumultuous torrent ran with a continuous roar. And
we staggered along under this heat, in this light, in this burning,
arid, desolate valley cut by this ravine of turbulent water