“Aren’t you tired?”
“Tired!” cried Saxe. “What fellow could feel tired in a place like this!”
Chapter Three.
Further Ideas of Magnitude.
The guide had already started off, and for the next half-hour he led them on and upward, gradually ascending a rocky eminence which stood like a vast tower in the middle of the amphitheatre.
Every now and then he stopped to hold out his ice-axe handle to help Saxe; but the latter disdained all aid, and contented himself with planting his feet in the same spots as the guide, till all at once the man stopped.
It was the top of the eminence; and as Saxe reached Melchior’s side he paused there, breathless with exertion and wonder, gazing now along the curved part of the comma, which had been hidden for the last hour.
Right and left were the silvery veil-like cascades: down below them some five hundred feet the little river roared and boomed, and the junction of the silvery water of the falls with the grey milky, churned-up foam of the torrent was plainly seen in two cases. But the sight which enchained Saxe’s attention was the head of the valley up which they had toiled, filled by what at the first glance seemed to be a huge cascade descending and flowing along the ravine before him, but which soon resolved itself into the first glacier—a wonderfully beautiful frozen river, rugged, wild and vast, but singularly free from the fallen stones and earth which usually rob these wonders of their beauty, and looking now in the bright sunshine dazzling in its purity of white, shaded by rift, crack and hollow, where the compressed snow was of the most delicate sapphire tint.