Читать книгу In an Unknown Prison Land. An account of convicts and colonists in New Caledonia with jottings out and home онлайн

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But when the wilderness of Nevada had been cast behind our flying wheels, and we began to climb up the wooded foothills of the Sierra Nevada—that snow-crowned mountain wall which divides one of the dreariest from one of the most beautiful regions on earth, the Great American Desert from “God’s own country”—it was time to sit up and use both your eyes and do your best to look out at both sides of the car at once.

It was here that the last and most beautiful stretch of the thirty-two-hundred-mile run began. Up the straight grades and round and round the twice and thrice-tiered loops the great train twined and circled; now skirting the shore of a still, pine-fringed lake, filling the bottom of a mountain valley; and now burrowing under the long snow-sheds, groaning under their weight of snow far away up the mountain-side, and so, mile by mile of distance, and yard by yard of height, the top of the Great Divide was reached.

The iron horses took a rest and a long drink at Alta, the summit station, and then,