The temple, of which some
massive hewn blocks and a fine column of Syenite granite still mark
the site, occupied a terrace facing the source of the river and
commanding a magnificent prospect. Across the foam and the roar of
the waterfalls you look up to the cavern and away to the top of the
sublime precipices above. So lofty is the cliff that the goats which
creep along its ledges to browse on the bushes appear like ants to
the spectator hundreds of feet below. Seaward the view is especially
impressive when the sun floods the profound gorge with golden light,
revealing all the fantastic buttresses and rounded towers of its
mountain rampart, and falling softly on the varied green of the
woods which clothe its depths. It was here that, according to the
legend, Adonis met Aphrodite for the first or the last time, and
here his mangled body was buried. A fairer scene could hardly be
imagined for a story of tragic love and death. Yet, sequestered as
the valley is and must always have been, it is not wholly deserted.
A convent or a village may be observed here and there standing out
against the sky on the top of some beetling crag, or clinging to the
face of a nearly perpendicular cliff high above the foam and the din
of the river; and at evening the lights that twinkle through the
gloom betray the presence of human habitations on slopes which might
seem inaccessible to man.
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