Brunswick and Magdeburg, and beyond them the great plain which extends to the North Sea in one direction and to Berlin in the other, while directly below us lay the dark mountains of the Hartz, with little villages in their sequestered valleys.  It was but a few moments I could look on this scene—­in an instant the clouds swept together again and completely hid it.  In accordance with a custom of the mountain, one of the girls made me a “Brocken nosegay,” of heather, lichens and moss.  I gave her a few pfennings and stowed it away carefully in a corner of my knapsack.

I now began descending the east side, by a good road over fields of bare rock and through large forests of pine.  Two or three bare brown peaks rose opposite with an air of the wildest sublimity, and in many places through the forest towered lofty crags.  This is the way by which Goethe brings Faust up the Brocken, and the scenery is graphically described in that part of the poem.  At the foot of the mountain is the little village of Schiercke, the highest in the Hartz.  Here I took a narrow path through the woods, and after following a tediously long road over the hills, reached Elbingerode, where I spent the night, and left the next morning for Blankenburg.  I happened to take the wrong road, however, and went through Rubeland, a little village in the valley of the Bode.  There are many iron works here, and two celebrated caves, called “Baumann’s Hohle,” and “Biel’s Hohle.”  I kept on through the gray, rocky hills to Huttenrode, where I inquired the way to the Rosstrappe, but was directed wrong, and after walking nearly two hours in a heavy rain, arrived at Ludwigshutte, on the Bode, in one of the wildest and loneliest corners of the Hartz.  I dried my wet clothes at a little inn, ate a dinner of bread and milk, and learning that I was just as far from the Rosstrappe as ever, and that the way was impossible to find alone, I hunted up a guide.

We went over the mountains through a fine old forest, for about two hours, and came out on the brow of a hill near the end of the Hartz, with a beautiful view of the country below and around.  Passing the little inn, the path led through thick bushes along the summit, over a narrow ledge of rocks that seemed to stretch out into the air, for on either side the foot of the precipice vanished in the depth below.

Arrived at last at the end, I looked around me.  What a spectacle!  I was standing on the end of a line of precipice which ran out from the mountain like a wall for several hundred feet—­the hills around rising up perpendicularly from the gorge below, where the Bode pressed into a narrow channel foamed its way through.  Sharp masses of gray rock rose up in many places from the main body like pillars, with trees clinging to the clefts, and although the defile was near seven hundred feet deep, the summits, in one place, were very near to one another.  Near the point at which I stood, which was secured by a railing, was an impression in the rock like the hoof of a giant horse, from which the place takes its name.  It is very distinct and perfect, and nearly two feet in length.