On the contrary, when the sun stepped out of his car upon the glacier and, at the most reasonable hour of eight on the clock, knocked us up, we were still reclining in our alcôve. Shall I say that we found at our bedside shaving water and a cup of tea? No, for this would be a really undue elongation of truth. But we saw the “boots” busy lighting odd scraps of paper and slipping them into our shoes to soften the frozen leather. We thanked him and were about to tip him when he took fright and flew away upon a sunbeam, leaving behind a pot of blacking and an electric brush.
If I ever did set eyes upon the Ski-runner of Vermala, it was during that night, nor could it have been in a better setting than on the Plain of the shrouded Dead. In fact, in the supposition that he is a person that never existed, the glacier de la Plaine-Morte would cry out for him.
Glaciers are legion, but there is only one glacier de la Plaine-Morte.
Measured with tape, its size, as our readers have learnt in a preceding chapter, would come out at a few miles.
Sir Martin Conway, in his “Alps from End to End,” comes nearer to conveying a correct impression, because he measures it by the standard of his own mind.
Those who have in any weather entrusted themselves in winter to that ice cup scooped out of the top of lofty Alpine battlements, may alone imagine in its true character the Alpine world as it was in those dim and distant days, when half Europe would have been too small to hold the glories of the Plaine-Morte in its prehistoric stage of being.
Since last year (1911), a cable railway runs passengers up from Sierre to Montana-Vermala. Some day, perhaps, the railway may be taken 5,000 feet higher. It would then pass the place where we spent the hours of our mystic night, alternately watchful and asleep, taking in the immense charm that flowed in upon us, and seeking in short terms of slumber rest from our meditation.
WILDSTRUBEL AND PLAINE MORTE GLACIER.
To face p. 100.