...of a view

Mountains which had long since been approaching were suddenly on top of us, we entered a valley where it was deliciously shady, though the foliage on the upper slopes was still bathed in sunlight. We plunged into a quiet that came from everywhere and nowhere, a delightful river of coolness. We turned a corner, and came to towering walls and pinnacles, contorted piles of rock and deep chasms, peaceful rounded eminences, summits or peaks, craggy crests and vertical precipices to which the bushes clung, then rocks on the heights and below them meadows descending into silence, an incomprehensible, motionless, universal silence, such a powerful silence that the noise of our minute, advancing carriage seemed to exist quite apart from it. This landscape continued for some time, and then a new element imposed itself, a nude or chaotic or shining, sometimes heroic, element, made up of chasms and abysses, solid rock, variations on the theme of overhanging cliffs, ascending and descending rhythms of trees and vegetation, wounds and scars and landslides; idylls floated toward us, sometimes soft and gentle and sometimes hard and crystalline. There were all sorts of different things - marvellous distances, enchanting convolutions, space captured and stretched, aggressive or yielding space, space twisting or bending, striking up or down. Gigantic, motionless movement.

[Cosmos, Gombrowicz, W.]