Full of interest they traversed the grand unfathomable river of ice,—the product of the compressed snows of innumerable winters,—and, reaching the other side in less than an hour, descended the Chapeau through the terminal moraine.
Those who have not seen it can form but a faint conception of the stupendous mass of débris which is cut, torn, wrenched, carried, swept, hurled, rolled, crushed, and ground down by a glacier from the mountain-heights into the plain below. The terminal moraine of the Mer de Glace is a whole valley whose floor and sides are not only quite, but deeply, covered with rocks of every shape and size, from a pebble the size of a pea, to a boulder as large as a cottage, all strewn, piled, and heaped together in a wild confusion that is eminently suggestive of the mighty force which cast them there.
“To me there do seem something dreadful as well as grand in it,” said Nita, as she sat down on a boulder beside Emma, near the lower end of the chaotic valley.
“It is, indeed, terrible,” answered Emma, “and fills me with wonder when I think that frozen water possesses power so stupendous.”
“And yet the same element,” said the Professor, “which, when frozen, thus rends the mountains with force irresistible, when melted flows through the land in gentle fertilising streams. In both forms its power is most wonderful.”
“Like that of Him who created it,” said Emma, in a low tone.
The party stood on the margin of a little pond or lakelet that had collected in the midst of the débris, and which, by reflecting the clear sky and their figures, with several large boulders on its margin, gave point and a measure of softness to the otherwise confused and rugged scene. While they stood and sat rapt in silent contemplation of the tongue of the Mer de Glace, at whose tip was the blue ice-cave whence issued the Arveiron, a lordly eagle rose from a neighbouring cliff and soared grandly over their heads, while a bright gleam of the sinking sun shot over the white shoulders of Mont Blanc and lit up the higher end of the valley, throwing the lower part into deeper shade by contrast.
“There is a warning to us,” said Lewis, whose chief interest in the scene lay in the reflection of it that gleamed from Nita Horetzki’s eyes.
“Which is the warning,” asked Slingsby, “the gleam of sunshine or the eagle?”
“Both, for while the sun is going to bed behind the snow, the eagle is doubtless going home to her eyrie, and Antoine tells me that it is full three miles from this spot to our hotel in Chamouni.”