We left them in their merriment,—
The singing angels of the snows,—
And still we climbed the steep ascent
Along the sunward way it knows.
The snow had slipped off the meadow,—was rushing away in the thundering river far below,—and the flowers were crowding each other, rejoicing in the brief gladness of summer before they should be shrouded again under the chilly whiteness. But their colour took revenge on it now. They glowed, they sang and shouted for joy—such was the vibration of their radiance! I have never dreamed of such a thing before.
And then came our next bad climb, up the bed of a ragged mountain torrent and across it, with the water lashing at us like a whip. I do not know how the ponies did it. They were clutched and dragged by the ears and tails, and a man seized me by the arms and hauled me up and round the face of a precipice, where to miss one step on the loose stones would have been to plunge into depths I preferred not to look at. Then another ascent like the Flea, but shorter, and we were a story higher, in another wild marg, all frosted silver with edelweiss, and glorious with the flowers of another zone—flowers that cling to the bare and lichened rock and ask no foothold of earth.
That was a wild way. We climbed and climbed steadfastly, sometimes riding, sometimes walking, and round us were rocks clothed with rose-red saxifrage, shaded into pink, and myriads of snowy stars, each with a star of ruby in its heart. Clouds still of the wonderful forget-me-not climbed with us. Such rock gardens! No earthly hand could plant those glowing masses and set them against the warm russets and golds of the lower crags, lifted up into this mighty sky world. The tenderness of the soft form and radiant colour of these little flowers in the cruel grasp of the rocks, yet softening them into grace with the short summer of their lives, is exquisitely touching. It has the pathos of all fragility and brief beauty.
Later we climbed a great horn of rock, and rounded a slender trail, and before was another camping-place—the Shisha-Nag Lake among the peaks. We saw its green river first, bursting through a rocky gateway, and then, far below, the lake itself,—
We passed the frozen sea of glass
Where never human foot has trod,