THE PETER BOTTE MOUNTAIN.

THE lofty and majestic mountains which rise here and there from the earth, and lift their hoary heads into the very clouds, are well fitted to give us grand ideas of the power of the Most High God. Some of them are volcanoes; that is, mountains which are hollow in the middle, where there is a vast furnace of fire, which sometimes bursts out and boils over. Some are so high as to be perpetually covered with snow; for at a very great height, the air becomes extremely cold. Some are of very singular shapes; and few are more remarkable in this respect than the Peter Botte, in the Island

of Mauritius. It is so called from a man of that name, who, it is said, tried to climb to the top of it, but fell down the dreadful precipice, and was dashed to pieces. Look at it in the picture, and you will wonder that any man should be so venturous as to attempt such a thing. Yet a few years ago, a party of English gentlemen (Englishmen, you know, will dare anything) determined again to try to ascend the Peter Botte. Captain Lloyd, accompanied by Mr. Dawkins, first attempted to climb it in 1831, and reached the narrow part, called the neck, where they planted a ladder, but which did not reach half way up the perpendicular face of the rock beyond. About a year afterwards, he resolved to attempt it again, accompanied by Lieutenant Phillpotts, Lieutenant Keppel, and Lieutenant Taylor, who has given us an account of the ascent. You will like to have it in this gentleman's own words.

"All our preparations being made, we started, and a more picturesque line of march I have seldom seen.

Our van was composed of about fifteen or twenty sepoys, in every variety of costume, together with a few negroes, carrying our food, dry clothes, &c. Our path lay up a very steep ravine, formed by the rains in the wet season, which, having loosened all the stones, made it anything but pleasant; those below were obliged to keep a bright look-out for tumbling rocks, and one of these missed Keppel and myself by a miracle.

"On rising to the shoulder, a view burst upon us, which quite defies my descriptive powers. We stood on a little narrow neck of land, about twenty yards in length. On the side which we mounted, we looked back into the deep-wooded gorge we had passed up; while, on the opposite of the neck, which was between six and seven feet broad, the precipice went shear down fifteen hundred feet to the plain. One extremity of the neck was equally precipitous, and the other was bounded by what to me was the most magnificent sight I ever saw.

A narrow, knife-like edge of rock, broken here and there by precipitous faces, ran up in a conical form, to about three hundred or three hundred and fifty feet above us; and on the very pinnacle old Peter Botte' frowned in all his glory.

"After a short rest, we proceeded to work. The ladder had been left by Lloyd and Dawkins last year. It was about twelve feet high, and reached, as you may perceive, about half-way up a face of perpendicular rock. The foot, which was spiked, rested on a ledge, not quite visible in the sketch, with barely three inches on each side. A negro of Lloyd's clambered from the top of the ladder by the cleft in the face of the rock; he carried a small cord round his middle; and it was fearful to see the cool, steady way in which he climbed, where a single loose stone or false hold must have sent him down into the abyss. However, he fearlessly scrambled away, till at length we heard him halloo from under the neck, All right.' These negroes use their feet exactly like