Parys Mountain

On every part of its surface the hill is as bare as the public road. No kind of vegetation can live in this sulphureous atmosphere; not a weed, not a lichen on the rocks has been spared.. We were amazingly struck with the first view of the mine, which is truly an astonishing monument of of human industry.. The mine has been worked like a stone quarry, and an immense crater has been formed nearly a mile in circumference; and in many parts, three hundred feet in depth. As we stood upon the verge of this tremendous chasm, it appeared to us like a mighty work of nature, produced by some great convulsion, but, certainly, suggested to our minds nothing so mean as the pick-axe and the spade. There were but few people at work, and their figures, disovered here and there among the huge rocks, looked merely as flies upon a wall, and one could scarcely imagine that, by these little creatures, each picking its little hole, the mountain had been thus demolished. The sides of the mine are mostly perpendicular, but the bottom is broken and irregular, and penetrated in various parts, by wide and deep hollows, in which veins of peculiar richness have been followed...