44 HEART OF THE SOUTHERN CATSKILLS 



mountains beneath us looked. The foresta 

 dropped down and undulated away over them, 

 covering them like a carpet. To the east we 

 looked over the near by Whittenburg range to 

 the Hudson and beyond; to the south Peek-o'- 

 Moose, with its sharp crest, and Table Moun- 

 tain, with its long level top, were the two con- 

 spicuous objects; in the west, Mt, Graham and 

 Double Top, about 3,800 feet each, arrested the 

 eye ; while in our front to the north we looked 

 over the top of Panther Mountain to the multi- 

 tudinous peaks of the Northern Catskills. All 

 was mountain and forest on every hand. Civ- 

 ilization seemed to have done little more than 

 to have scratched this rough, shaggy surface of 

 the earth here and there. In any such view, 

 the Avild, the aboriginal, the geographical 

 greatly predominate. The works of man dwin- 

 dle, and the original features of the huge globe 

 come out. Every single object or point is 

 dwarfed; the valley of the Hudson is only a 

 wrinkle in the earth's surface. You discover 

 with a feeling of surprise that the great thing 

 is the earth itself, which stretches away on 

 every hand so far beyond your ken. 



The Arabs believe that the mountains steady 

 the earth and hold it together; but they had 

 only to get on the top of a high one to see how 

 insignificant they are, and how adequate the 

 earth looks to get along without them. To the 

 imaginative Oriental people mountains seemed 

 to mean much more than they do to us. They 

 were sacred; they were the abodes of theii 



