After two days’ journey we reached the foot of a chain of mountains, the summits of which were lost in the clouds. We set about ascending them, however, courageously, for we hoped that beyond them we should find the Yellow River. That day’s journey was very painful, especially to the camels, for every step was upon sharp, rugged rock; and their feet, accordingly, were very speedily bleeding. We ourselves, however, were too absorbed with the strange, fantastic aspect of the mountains we were traversing to think of the toil they occasioned us.
In the hollows and chasms of the precipices formed by these lofty mountains, you see nothing but great heaps of mica and laminated stones, broken, bruised, and in some cases absolutely pulverised. This wreck of slate and schist must have been brought into these abysses by some deluge, for it in no way belongs to the mountains themselves, which are of granite. As you approach the summits, the mountains assume forms more and more fantastic. You see great heaps of rock piled one upon the other, and apparently cemented together. These rocks are almost entirely encrusted with shells and the remains of a plant resembling sea weed; but that which is most remarkable is that these granitic masses are cut and torn and worn in every direction, presenting a ramification of holes and cavities, meandering in a thousand complicated turns and twists, so that you might imagine all the upper portion of each mountain to have been subjected to the slow and destructive action of immense worms. Sometimes in the granite you find deep impressions, that seem the moulds of monsters, whose forms they still closely retain.
As we gazed upon all these phenomena, it seemed to us that we were travelling in the bed of some exhausted ocean. Everything tended to the belief that these mountains had undergone the gradual action of the sea. It is impossible to attribute all you see there to the influence of mere rain, or still less to the inundations of the Yellow River, which, however prodigious they may be, can never have attained so great an elevation. The geologists who affirm that the deluge took place by sinking, and not by a depolarization of the earth, might probably find in these mountains good arguments in favour of their system.