“Big birds!” she repeated, “with beaks like this”—she put her forefinger to her forehead, and described thence a brilliant outward curve—“with big wings”—she flapped her arms violently—“big birds who steal lambs!”
“Ah,” said Griffith Roberts, “ze fahxes! Oh yess, many fahxes.”
Miss O’Flannigan sat down again, and I laughed a great deal.
Having identified the winged and beaked Snowdon foxes, Griffith Roberts displayed no further intelligence, nor, indeed, did Miss O’Flannigan; and after another minute’s grace we were crawling again up the dark, heathery slope that at each step grew steadily steeper. I was full of determination, but I did not enjoy myself, and I began to have grave doubts on the subject of getting the “second wind” fabled by the athletic. Lightly had we persuaded ourselves that days spent during previous winters in following hounds on foot over the mountain-sides of West Cork would have been ample preparation for Mont Blanc. The West Cork fox is a gentleman, and has a consideration for his followers that was undreamed of by Griffith Roberts. Heather tussock, slippery grass, loose stones, shelving rock, came in steep succession as unending as the rungs of Jacob’s ladder, all of them achievements in their turn, each one rather more so than the last. In fact, Jacob’s ladder, or any other frankly precipitous thing, where one could have been helped by one’s hands, would have been preferable to the short cut by means of which Griffith Roberts abbreviated, and at the same time imparted, the bitterness of death to the ascent.
The air became perceptibly sharp as we went up, and scraps of cloud floated near us across the delusive stretches of desolation. Everything was harmoniously huge: the Eiffel Tower, perched on one of the crags, might have restored to the eye some sense of the human scale of measurement; but to think of feet—even of the guide’s, of which it might truly be said that “a deal of his leg had been turned up when they were made”—was an idle effort of memory. It was half an hour before our guide paused again; the short cut, and we with it, had climbed a moraine of boulders, and rejoined the orthodox path, and a rest came as an unlooked-for mercy.
“Ferry deep,” said Griffith Roberts, leaving the path and moving cautiously towards a low grassy rampart, behind which the mist steamed billowing up.
We knelt with our elbows on the rampart, and saw chaos heaped in grey vapour below—chaos stirred as if with a ladle, and weltering slow and mysterious in the perfect quiet of the air. As we watched, some unseen force from below tore an upward opening through the mist, and our nerves dived tingling down it to where, at the bottom of all things, a little leaden lake lay dead and sombre. The cliff on which we were kneeling ran with a tremendous horse-shoe curve right up to the highest peak of Snowdon, a point darkly visible in the greyness, and depressingly remote. Could
The ascent of Snowdon.