The Black Ghost of the Highway

The roads at the crossing were wide and smooth, with cool woods on either side, but beyond them to the left rose the high, jagged, yellow-and-black mass of the mountains, bare on their upper reaches, and wooded in the shelter of the valleys, a splintered peak or two farthest inland showing snowcapped even in August. They dominated the narrow strip of fertile, hilly land between them and the sea, abrupt, savage, Central European. One of the roads led up through a cloven valley and was engulfed in it, the other ran more levelly along the sea coast. John stopped while we stared. It was not the first time that we had stopped in the last few days just to look at a landscape.