Their route gradually took them among the Blue
Mountains, which assumed the most rugged aspect on a near approach.
They were shagged with dense and gloomy forests, and cut up by deep and
precipitous ravines, extremely toilsome to the horses. Sometimes the
travellers had to follow the course of some brawling stream, with a
broken, rocky bed, which the shouldering cliffs and promontories on
either side obliged them frequently to cross and recross. For some miles
they struggled forward through these savage and darkly wooded defiles,
when all at once the whole landscape changed, as if by magic. The
rude mountains and rugged ravines softened into beautiful hills, and
intervening meadows, with rivulets winding through fresh herbage, and
sparkling and murmuring over gravelly beds, the whole forming a verdant
and pastoral scene, which derived additional charms from being locked up
in the bosom of such a hard-hearted region.
Emerging from the chain of Blue Mountains, they descended upon a vast
plain, almost a dead level, sixty miles in circumference, Of excellent
soil, with fine streams meandering through it in every direction,
their courses marked out in the wide landscape by serpentine lines of
cotton-wood trees, and willows, which fringed their banks, and afforded
sustenance to great numbers of beavers and otters.
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