THE GREAT STONE FACE.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3219, 24 October 1881, Page 3

THE GREAT STONE FACE.

Six miles of continual ascent have brought us to Profile Lake. Although a pretty enough piece of water, it is not for itself this lake is resorted to by the thousand, or for the trout which you take for the reflection of birds on its burnished surface, bat for the mountain rising high above, whose wooded slopes it so faithfully mirrors. Now lift the eyes to the bare summit. It is difficult to believe the evidence of _ the senses. Upon the cliffs of thi3 mountain is the remarkable and celebrated natural rocksculpture of a human head, which, from a height of 1,200 feet above the lake, has for uncounted ages looked with the same stony stare down the pass upon the windings of the river thorough its incomparable valley, The profile itself measures about 40 feet from tip of the chin to the flatted crown, which imparts to it such a peculiarly antique appearance. It is perfect, except that the forehead is concealed by something like the visor of a helmet. And all this allusion is produced by several projecting crags. It might be saia to have been begotten by a thunderbolt. Taking a seat within a rustic arbour on the high shore of the lake, one is at liberty to peruse at leisure what, I dare say, is the most extraordinary sight of a lifetime. A slight change of position varies more or less the character of the expression, which is, after all, the marked peculiarity of this monstrous alto-relievo; for, "let the spectator turn his gaze vacantly upon the more familiar objects at hand, as ha inevitably will, to assure himself that he is not the victim of some strange hallucination, fascinatiion boro neither of admiration nor a horror, but strongly partaking' of both emotions, draws him irresistably back to theDantesque head, stuck, like a felon's, on the highest battlements of the pass. The more you may have seen, the more your feelings are disciplined, the greater the confusion of ideas. The moment is come to acknowledge yourself vanquished. This is not merely a face, it is a portrait. That is not the work of some cunning chisel, but a cast from a living head. You fell and will was always maintain that those features have had a living and breathing counterpart. Nothing more, nothing less. But where and what was the original prototype ? Not man, since ages before he was created the chisel of the Almighty wrought this sculpture upon the rock above us. No! net a man; the face is too majestic, too nobly grand, for anything of mortal mould. One of* the antique gods may, perhaps, have set for this archetype of the coming man. And yet, not man, we think, for the head will surely hold the same strange converse with futurity when man shall have vanished from the face of the earth. Had Byron visited this place of awe and mystery, his "Manifred," the scene of which is laid among the mountains of the Bernese Alps, would doubtless have had a deeper, perhaps a more sinister, impulse; but even among those eternal realms of ice the poet never beheld an object that could so arouse the gloomy exaltation he has breathed into that tragedy. His line — Bound to earth he lifts his ere to heaven, becomes descriptive here. This gigantic silhoutte, which has been christened the " Old man of the Mountain," is unquestionably the greatest curiosity of this or any other mountain region. But it is not merely curious ; nor is it more marvellous for the wonderful accuracy of outline than for the almost suporhuman expression of frozen terror it eternally fixes on the vague and shadowy distance—a far-away look, an intense and speechless amazement, such as sometimes settles upon the faces of the dying, untranslatable into words, but seeming to declare the presence of some unutterable vision too bright and dazzling for mortal eyes to behold. Tha face puts the whole world behind it. —Samuel Adams Drake, in Harper's Monthly.