TOPOGRAPHY OF VICTORIA. 387 



vapour, and investing them with an air of mystery. For days, and even weeks together, 

 they are completely effaced blotted out by the opaque masses of rain-cloud rolling up 

 their massive sides and resembling emanations from the surface of some vast chauldron, 

 or the mists and exhalations which Faust describes as arising from the deepest abysses 

 of the Brocken : and when the short tempestuous day has yielded to the night, the 

 scene recalls that so vividly depicted by an English poet : 



The reeling clouds 



Stagger with dizzy poise, as doubting yet 

 Which master to obey: while rising slow, 

 Blank, in the leaden-coloured east, the moon 

 Wears a wan circle round her blunted horns. 

 Seen through the turbid fluctuating air, 

 The stars obtuse emit a shivering ray ; 

 Or frequent seem to shoot athwart the gloom, 

 And long behind them trail the whitening blaze. 



By night or by day the transitory glimpses afforded of these huge ranges impress one 

 with a deeper feeling, not only of their bulk and magnitude, but of their elevation, for 

 they loom through the mist, or reveal themselves with imposing effect when the clouds 

 are suddenly riven asunder, with an augmentation of their mass attributable to the 

 vapoury medium which interposes itself between them and the eye of the spectator. Other 

 transformations occur in the aspect of these ranges after an interval of cold clear weather, 

 at the same period of the year, when the free-selector on the distant plains, issuing 

 from the door of his hut in the early morning, sees the crests of the far-stretching mass 

 sharply outlined against a steel-blue sky, wearing a robe of spotless white, woven by the 

 deft and subtle ringers of the frost during the stillness of the night, out of the wreaths 

 of vapour which had been drifting along the ridges when the darkness fell upon them 

 a few hours before. 



A radial line of thirty miles drawn from Mount Bogong would comprehend within 

 its circumference, with one exception, the whole of the loftiest peaks in Victoria ; as, for 

 example, Towanga (four thousand one hundred and sixty-one feet), The Buffalo (five thou- 

 sand six hundred and forty-five feet), Feathertop (six thousand three hundred and three 

 feet), Fainter (six thousand one hundred and sixty feet), Hotham (six thousand one 

 hundred feet), Cope (six thousand and fifteen feet), Wills (five thousand seven hundred 

 and fifty-eight feet), Tambo (four thousand seven hundred feet), Benambra (four thousand 

 eight hundred and fifty feet), and The Twins (five thousand five hundred and seventy- 

 five feet). The exception is Mount Cobberas (which lies about fifty miles, as the crow 

 flies, due east of Mount Bogong), the monarch of the Victorian mountains, being six 

 thousand five hundred and eight feet above the sea-level. 



The geological formations of this district, as mapped out and explained by Mr. 

 Reginald A. F. Murray, are few in number, and so simple as to render them intelligible 

 to the non-scientific reader : " Lower silurian slates, shales and sandstones, and metamor- 

 phic schists and granites form the bed-rock of the whole. This bed-rock is overlaid in 

 parts by gravels, sands and clays, whose fossil flora indicate them to be of miocene or 

 middle tertiary age ; and, wherever found, these are covered by varying thicknesses of 

 lava, forming the plateaux or high plains already referred to " : that is to say, the 

 Bogong and Dargo highlands, consisting of open, undulating plains and moors, from four 



