La Ciudad Encantada 



About half-way up the zig-zag path by which we were 

 ascending the mountain, there was a huge block of stone 

 which had fallen from the impending cliff. It was some- 

 thing like the size and shape of a great whale, about sixty 

 feet long, and twenty-five high in the round of its back. We 

 inquired about it, and the old posadero said that it was 

 called the piedra d-e las almas^ because it had fallen at the 

 vesper-time of las almas. It fell in the year 1797, and he 

 remembered the tremendous noise it made in the glen. He 

 was a lad at the time, and was out with his father cutting 

 wood. 



On the top of the hill we entered a large pine forest, 

 among which, here and there, great rocks began to appear ; 

 and at length we reached an open space, beyond which 

 stood several heavy-headed stones about thirty feet high, 

 set upon narrow necks, and looking something like clumsy 

 columns. Our guides told us this was the beginning of the 

 enchanted city. We shortly entered it. 



It is composed of long ranges of generally perpendicular 

 rock, thirty or forty feet high, between which are narrow 

 lanes of green closely-cropped sward. Sheep and shepherds 

 are the city's only inhabitants. Here and there the lanes 

 narrowed, and the leaning walls joined over-head like a rude 

 gateway. Here and there, too, were heavy-headed projec- 

 tions from the walls, which bore some remote resemblance 

 to clumsy Egyptian pilasters. 



Still, after hunting up and down the grassy streets of the 

 labyrinth for a spacious point of view, I found nothing which 

 could pass, when drawn, for a street, in even the most ante- 

 Cheopsean style of architecture. In hopes of a more exten- 

 sive prospect, and being moreover stimulated by Harry's 

 surmising that it could not be done, I climbed one of the rock 

 walls, which being of a honey-combed, sponge-like surface 



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