"He unrolled the Bartram and held it to the yellow light and riffled through the pages until his eyes fell on a passage that caught his attention. It was this:
The mountainous wilderness which I had lately traversed appeared regularly undulated as the great ocean aftee a tempest; the undulations gradually depressing, yet perfectly regular, as the squama of fish, or imbrications of tile on a roof: the nearest ground to me of a perfect full green; next more glaucous; and lastly almost blue as the ether with which the most distant curve of the horizon seemed to be blended. My imagination thus wholly engaged in the contemplation of this magnificent landscape, infinitely varied, and without bound, I was almost insensible or regardless of the charming objects more within my reach.
A picture of the land Bartram detailed leapt dimensional into Inman's mind. Mountains and valleys on and on forever."
- From Cold Mountain, P 276, by Charles Frazier
"Yet farther up the road, near a hole in the river where people were sometimes dipped in baptism, a cloud of martins erupted out of a maple tree nearing the peak of its color. The sun's bottom limb was just touching the ridge and the sky was the color of hammered pewter. The martins flew from the tree as one body, still in the shape of the round maple they had filled. Then they banked into the wind, slipped sideways int he moving air on extended wings for two heartbeats, so that Ada viewed them in thin profile and saw much silver space between the individual birds. Immediately, as if on signal, they swept into a steep climb and the fullness of their wings turned toward her and closed the bright gaps between the birds so that the flock looked like the black image of the red maple projected into the sky. The bird shadows across the long field grass beyond the road flickered." - From Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier
"You could look out across that folded landscape and every sense you had told only that this was all the world there was." - from Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier, p 280
