One of the weird sights of this region is a mountain fire. On a dark night such conflagrations are, of course, more spectacular, and when belts of flame cover large areas and are detached fiercely from one another, the resemblance to Kilauea, the burning lake of the Sandwich Island, is startling. In these days of Hawaiian perturbation and discussion one could easily imagine that he was in the Eden Isle of the Pacific ocean, and might look for dusky maidens darting by on horseback with red hybiscus flowers blushing in their lustrous black hair.
This enchanted region is reached by the Richmond & Danville railroad, whose lines furnish approach also to many other places in the alpine location of South Carolina and Georgia that merit equal attention with these scenes so imperfectly described or sketched from memory. Cæsar’s Head, near Greenville, is a genuine curiosity, and even the old European or Rocky Mountain traveller admits that the prospect from this precipitous elevation is awesome and inspirational. At the old town of Clarksville, in North Georgia, the scenery is transcendent. Once you have seen Mount Yonah you will never forget it, and when will ever fade from your recollection the prodigious carving, by witchery in distant perspective, of the Cherokee chief stretched gigantically upon his sky-line bier? From the porches of Roseneath villa you best discern this strange conformation. There he extends, in tremendous dimensions, graven on the horizon, a distinct and spectral Indian shape, with drooping plumes. The people thereabout know him familiarly as Skiahjagustah. You may, in quest of gold, for the region is full of it, seek to penetrate this mysterious personage, but he will vanish as you approach him, transformed to common rock and tree and shrub, and yet reappear by enchantment when you go back to Roseneath and summon him from beyond the Soquee river. Here asthma has no clutch and rheumatism ceases to torment. A German workman came here crippled from New Jersey, and presently grew perfectly well in this climate. He is busily at work in wood and iron in a shop of his own, and happy in possession of a little farm, which has a famous vineyard like unto those which gem the banks of the Rhine or Moselle.