His voice found an echo in his companion's soul; she was silent.
"Come! let us go on," said he.
They rushed on together by the paths faintly visible along the mountain side, devouring the distance, flying from shelf to shelf, from ledge to ledge, with the swiftness of the Arab horse, that bird of the desert. In a few minutes they reached a green carpet of grass, moss, and flowers, on which no one yet had ever rested.
"What a pretty sœ!" cried Minna, giving the native name to this little meadow; "but how comes it here, so high up?"
"Here, indeed, the Norwegian vegetation ceases," said Seraphitus; "and if a few plants and flowers thrive on this spot, it is thanks to the shelter of the rock which protects them from the Polar cold.—Put this spray in your bosom, Minna," he went on, plucking a flower; "take this sweet creature on which no human eye has yet rested, and keep the unique blossom in memory of this day, unique in your life! You will never again find a guide to lead you to this sœter."
He hastily gave her a hybrid plant which his eagle eye had discerned among the growth of silene acaulis and saxifrage, a real miracle developed under the breath of angels. Minna seized it with childlike eagerness; a tuft of green, as transparent and vivid as an emerald, composed of tiny leaves curled into cones, light brown at the heart, shaded softly to green at the point, and cut into infinitely delicate teeth. These leaves were so closely set that they seemed to mingle in a dense mass of dainty rosettes. Here and there this cushion was studded with white stars edged with a line of gold, and from the heart of each grew a bunch of purple stamens without a pistil. A scent that seemed to combine that of the rose and of the orange-blossom, but wilder and more ethereal, gave a heavenly charm to this mysterious flower, at which Seraphitus gazed with melancholy, as though its perfume had expressed to him a plaintive thought, which he alone understood. To Minna this amazing blossom seemed a caprice of Nature, who had amused herself by endowing a handful of gems with the freshness, tenderness, and fragrance of a plant.
"Why should it be unique? Will it never reproduce its kind?" said she to Seraphitus, who colored and changed the subject.
"Let us sit down—turn round—look! At such a height you will perhaps not be frightened. The gulfs are so far below that you cannot measure their depth; they have the level perspective of the sea, the indefiniteness of the clouds, the hue of the sky. The ice in the fiord is an exquisite turquoise, the pine forests are visible only as dim brown streaks. To us the depths may well be thus disguised."
Seraphitus spoke these words with that unction of tone and gesture which is known only to those who have attained to the highest places on the mountains of the earth, and which is so involuntarily assumed that the most arrogant master finds himself prompted to treat his guide as a brother, and never feels himself the superior till they have descended into the valleys where men dwell.
He untied Minna's snow-shoes, kneeling at her feet. The girl did not notice it, so much was she amazed at the imposing spectacle of the Norwegian panorama—the long stretch of rocks lying before her at a glance, so much was she struck by the perennial solemnity of those frozen summits, for which words have no expression.