2-752-666 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

'Castellated Rock', 1872. Rock formation in Northern California, USA: 'a range of granite and limestone rocks, which attains an elevation from the plain of three thousand feet, and is broken into a multitude of ragged forms...The granite...relieves the dazzling white of the limestone. When the sun shines upon the latter, the observer can hardly tell it from marble, so brilliant is its snowy hue. The line of these singular hills is of considerable length, extending, indeed, along the whole valley of the Pitt...their appearance is finely castellated...the shrill scream of the bald-eagle is heard from the loftiest and most inaccessible peaks, where these birds build their eyries...the glare of the noonday sun, falling upon these peaks of snowy limestone that rear themselves upward...like a huge ice-wall...is positively blinding'. From "Picturesque America; or, The Land We Live In, A Delineation by Pen and Pencil of the Mountains, Rivers, Lakes...with Illustrations on Steel and Wood by Eminent American Artists" Vol. I, edited by William Cullen Bryant. [D. Appleton and Company, New York, 1872]