On the left he had the sublime prospect of the pallisado rocks, whose dark columnar front, like a towering battlement, witli here and there a projection like the salient angle of a bastion, presented perpendicular elevations from three to five hundred feet, and, ranging more than thirty miles uninterrupted, (except by the valley of the Nyack,) it at last exhibited an altitude of nearly seven hundred feet,<= and then vanished from his sight on the remote, but still more elevated range of the High Tourn and Tourn Mountains. On the right he beheld a comparatively low but undulating border, which, in the luxuriance of autumnal foliage, afforded a striking contrast and a pleasing relief as he turned from the sublimity and barrenness of the opposite cliffs. Onward he perceived the river in its first course of thirty miles, very gradually widening until it suddenly presented the broad expanse of a bay (' Tappaanse Zee.') Then

» At Bergen Point.

b At the head of the Highlands.

e South peak of Vredidcka Hook.

COUNTY OF WESTCHESTER. 93

as he passed into another, (Haverstraw,) and viewed the insuperable barriers of mountains that lay before him, he considered his discovery terminated, until, in searching for a passage, he found one which proved to be the continuation of a river, now serpentining in its course, deepening and narrowing, until it brought him to ' where the land grew very high and mountainous.' Here he anchored for the ensuing night. a This was directly opposite West Point."