terça-feira, 30 de novembro de 2021

"Love Lane"

The sea road carried around the cliffs from the East end of the Praya, past Cacilhas Bay, to the Barrier, is the favourite resort for pedestrian exercise but in addition to this, the new roads cut through the central portion of the Peninsula, afford several pleasant promenades. One of the older roads shaded by the dense foliage of bamboos and banians and leading nowhere in particular, has the appropriate title of Love Lane.*
But few wheeled vehicles and those small pony carriages are kept in Macao and the roads are hence maintained in repair without so much difficulty as in Hongkong.
Longer excursions and pic nics are occasionally made to the adjacent islands, the Valley of the Ringing Rocks being especially frequented.
Crossing the inner harbour to the lower end of Lappa island and landing at a small fishing village on the beach, visitors find a rude pathway winding eastward through the hills and follow the picturesque course of a little stream for about a mile until further progress seems barred by the rugged walls of a ravine down which a gigantic stream of granite boulders appears to have been hurled form ing a moraine strikingly similar to those which have resulted from glacial action in Switzerland and other Alpine regions.
The torrent of rocks at this spot has, however, most probably resulted merely from the disintegration of the softer matrix of alkaline felspar in which these masses of quartz rock were imbedded. Two of the boulders which here lie piled one above the other in huge confusion give out, when struck, a clear bell like sound due probably to their accidental poising in a favourable position. Hence the name by which foreigners know the valley. In Chinese it is called the Silver Gorge.
The granite composing the ringing rocks appears to contain a large proportion of hornblende differing from the ordinary syenite of the coast chiefly in its colour which has a red or purplish tinge probably due to the presence of iron. The Hot Springs of Yung Mak situated on the main island of Hiangshan, at a distance of about 20 miles NNW from Macao, are a subject of much interest and are frequently visited by excursion parties. (...)
in The Treaty Ports of China and Japan: A Complete Guide to the Open Ports of those Countries, together with Peking, Yedo, Hongkong and Macao, Hong Kong, 1867.
* Harriet Low também usou o termo "love lane" para descrever um passeio ao longo da praia da areia preta, perto da Porta do Cerco. Corresponde à antiga Estrada da Bela Vista, uma via marginal no sopé norte do Jardim da Montanha Russa, que ligava à Rampa dos Cavaleiros e à Praia do Bairro da Areia Preta

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