The Mosel has but few tributary streams of importance; its own course is as winding, as wild and as romantic as that of the Rhine itself.  The most interesting part of the very varied scenery of this river is not the castles, the antique towns, the dense woods or the teeming vineyards lining rocks where a chamois could hardly stand—­all this it has in common with the Rhine—­but the volcanic region of the Eifel, the lakes in ancient craters, the tossed masses of lava and tufa, the great wastes strewn with dark boulders, the rifts that are called valleys and are like the Iceland gorges, the poor, starved villages and the extraordinary rusticity, not to say coarseness, of the inhabitants.  This grotesque, interesting country—­unique, I believe, on the continent of Europe—­lies in a small triangle between the Mosel, the Belgian frontier and the Schiefer hills of the Lower Rhine; it goes by the names of the High Eifel, with the High Acht, the Kellberg and the Nurburg; the upper (Vorder) Eifel, with Gerolstein, a ruined castle, and Daun, a pretty village; and the Snow-Eifel (Schnee Eifel), contracted by the speech of the country into Schneifel.

The last is the most curious, the most dreary, the least visited.  Walls of sharp rocks rise up over eight hundred feet high round some of its sunken lakes—­one is called the Powder Lake—­and the level above this abyss stretches out in moors and desolate downs, peopled with herds of lean sheep, and marked here and there by sepulchral, gibbet-looking signposts, shaped like a rough T and set in a heap of loose stones.  It is a great contrast to turn aside from this landscape and look on the smiling villages and pretty wooded scenery of the valley of the Mosel proper; the long lines of handsome, healthy women washing their linen on the banks; the old ferryboats crossing by the help of antique chain-and-rope contrivances; the groves of old trees, with broken walls and rude shrines, reminding one of Southern Italy and her olives and ilexes; and the picturesque houses, in Kochem, in Daun, in Travbach, in Bernkastel, which, however untiring one may be as a sightseer, hardly warrant one as a writer to describe and re-describe their beauties.  Kluesserath, however, we must mention, because its straggling figure has given rise to a local proverb—­“As long as Kluesserath;” and Neumagen, because of the legend of Constantine, who is said to have seen the cross of victory in the heavens at this place, as well as at Sinzig on the Rhine, and, as the more famous legend tells us, at the Pons Milvium over the Tiber.

The last glance we take at the beauties of this neighborhood is from the mouth of the torrent-river Eltz as it dashes into the Eifel, washing the rock on which stands the castle of Eltz.  The building and the family are an exception in the history of these lands; both exist to this day, and are prosperous and undaunted, notwithstanding all the efforts of enemies, time and circumstances to the contrary.  The strongly-turreted wall runs from the castle till it loses itself in the rock, and the building has a home-like inhabited, complete look; which, in virtue of the quaint irregularity and magnificent natural position of the castle, standing guard over the foaming Eltz, does not take from its romantic appearance, as preservation or restoration too often does.