This pass, after some six miles, ends in a
lonely plain of sterile meadows, hemmed
in by lofty mountains, with a black tarn,
beside a solitary house. This single house
—an inn—is called Landro; and here we
changed horses, and were greeted by a
most pleasing and intelligent landlady,
whose genuine love for her native
mountains, and her desire that they should
appear with all becoming splendour, was
quite touching. The creature comforts
here are well cared for—but it is a spot
where those who love "to sup of horrors"
in the way of scenery may be content.

I walked out beside the little lake on
the flowerless grass. In front, rising sheer
from the plain in one huge mass, cleft into
many-pointed spires, stands Monte
Cristallo, eleven thousand feet high. As its
name implies, it is white and transparent,
and in its jagged and tormented bosom lie
glaciers and snowdrifts. I hope I shall
not be thought fanciful if I own the sight
of it made me shudder—it looked like the
ghost of a mountain, a something horrible
and supernatural; it was so strangely pale,
so deathlike, with grey mysterious mists
stealing over its broken surface. Yet was
it beautiful in spectral beauty.

The whole scene comes to me like a
vision; the dreary woods over the lower
heights, the pale Dolomites above,
mountains everywhere, walling us up as in a
fantastic prison-house. To the left, looking
through a rocky cleft of many thousand
feet, rose the splintered cliffs and clustered
points of the Drei Zinnen, nearly ten thousand
feet high. Of peculiarly calcareous
stone, porous and fragile-looking, it sharply
cuts against the sky in forms of towers and
battlements, like some Titanic fortress,
the cloud-home of the spirits ruling these
awful solitudes.

I had decided to follow the fortunes of
the eilwagen as far as Cortina, in Ampezzo,
where it stopped for the night. Our road
terraced along a wooded valley, the Höllenthal,
through Dolomites, which lay on either
hand, too numerous to have special names,
a perfect fastness of mountains. As the
night approached and the shadows became
deeper, the weird individuality and almost
human expression of some of these misty
giants, strange, abrupt, and unlooked for,
became almost oppressive. I came to think
that they were mountains run mad.
Specially fearful was a high pile of rock, standing
somewhat apart, the Geislstein, with
great red stains like blood on its shaggy
sides.

It was a great relief to see human faces,
and hear voices, to break the weird influence
that would creep over one.
Schludersbach is a pleasant country inn, a capital
starting-point for excursions to the ghostly
Monte Cristallo, whose pale pointed peaks
were still visible, and to the Lake of Misurina,
a basin hollowed out in its sides.
The altitude of all these mountains is very
great, but with some huge exceptions they
are all so much on the same level that the
eye becomes accustomed to a sole of ten
and twelve thousand feet without surprise,
especially as they are clustered together,
and no lower summits appear with which
to compare them. The road, invariably
excellent, gradually mounts towards the
blood-stained rock, which shuts in and
terminates this valley. Arrived at a
considerable height, the mountains divide, and
yonder below, down a chasm, opens up an
extensive prospect over the broad and well-
watered valley of Ampezzo, rich with wood,
and corn, and fragrant grass, bordered and
sheltered by lines of interlacing mountains.
To the left, heading a rocky pile, are the
ruins of Peutelstein Castle; to the right,
towering over the lesser Dolomites, rises
Monte Tofana, while to the left the spectral
Monte Cristallo unfolds its glassy cliffs.
These are the giants of the land, on whom
wait crowds of nameless vassals, over whom
they tower in majestic sovereignty.

The Ampezzo valley once reached, down
a zigzagged road, I awoke from the
Dolomite nightmare into which I had again
fallen. Here were fields, houses, walls, signs
of human vitality. The uncanny mountains
are still there on either hand, grimly keeping
watch, but away at a distance. The
gloomy forests, and the river, dashing over
and dividing the grey stones, no longer bar
and narrow the road. The strange
fantastic images that people those mysterious
valleys are left behind in the shadows of
the incoming night.

It was now past six o'clock, and almost
dark. I had travelled all day. I had
explored a new world—it seemed a month
since I had left Brixen. I felt that I
needed rest and food. Three miles along a
flat road brought as to cheerful, white-
walled Cortina (in Ampezzo), standing
among bare fields like a toy town, with its
toy church and campanile, and two hotels,
painfully neat and civilised, and wide awake.
Here the eilwagen drew up at the Post, and
I sought the hospitable shelter of the Aquila
Nera, a square house also of the toy pattern,
suggestive of warmth, comfort, and good