Lige

“ Old and experienced hunters have done what you did, but I must say it's the first time I ever heard of a boy even attempting it."
"Are the dogs dead?" asked Tad solicitously.
"No. But, like you, they're pretty sore. You saved Ginger's life, and I guess he knows it. You can see how he keeps crawling up to you, though he can hardly drag his body along."
"Good Ginger," soothed Tad, patting the wounded beast, which the hound acknowledged by a feeble wag of its tail.
"Now, if you boys are satisfied, I propose that we start back in the morning," advised Lige. ”

“ The hue of the orbs was the most brilliant of black, and far over them hung jetty lashes of great length. The brows, slightly irregular in outline, had the same tint. The "strangeness," however, which I found in the eyes, was of a nature distinct from the formation, or the color, or the brilliancy of the features, and must, after all, be referred to the expression. Ah, word of no meaning, behind whose vast latitude of mere sound we intrench our ignorance of so much of the spiritual! The expression of the eyes of Ligeia! ”

“ The situation was desperate, for the long rope was stretched as tight as a violin string, and the middle of it scarcely touched the water. It was blowing so hard, too, that a man could hardly stand upright, but was obliged to creep along the clean-swept snow-field, so that there could be no thought of helping. ”

“ The theory of the veins which perhaps first presents itself to the mind, and which is still entertained by many intelligent Alpine explorers, is that the veining of the middle glaciers is simply a continuation of the bedding of the névé; that not only do the annual snow-falls produce beds of great thickness, but every successive fall tends to produce a layer of less thickness, which layers, or the surfaces separating them, ultimately appear as the blue veins. ”

“ Sometimes it seemed almost to succeed; suddenly, when they most needed light to guide their six-foot runners between the great boulders, the light would go out like a torch in the water. The gusts lay in wait for them at the corners, to leap out and lash their faces with a shriek that chattered their teeth. The lulls between the gusts were even worse; it seemed as though the whole world were holding its breath in dread. They held theirs, darting uneasy glances at the glacier wall glittering far ahead of them.
When a long, low wail smote their ears, their hearts leaped into their throats. ”

“ The long ridge of ice which had been heaped up in the mid-channel had increased to thrice its former height, and the crunching and grinding of the vast masses arose above the roaring of the storm. Far up the river there came a deeper and fuller sound of the same kind, which, brought down by the wind, burst with increasing terrors upon the ear. The ridge of ice was in constant motion, being pressed and heaped up in ever-increasing masses, and, as it heaped itself up, toppling over and falling with a noise like thunder. ”

“ The bloody traces of man meet one every where—stain even the eternal snow!
The sun continued to shine brightly daring the whole time of our stay at the glacier, and its beams seemed to recall the masses of cloud which gathered together on the ridge of the Grimsel mountain, and which continued restlessly to vault themselves there, as if they were ready to hurl themselves down over the valley. ”

“ Art lives in the night; the sun sets for its inhabitants at two o’clock.
“A moment later the sun had disappeared, the wind blew cold, the mountains were grey. Not a cloud was in the sky. The Rigi had become solitary once more, with a boundless blue sky arching above.
“In one of my earlier letters I spoke of [Pg 310] ‘these granite waves called Alps.’ I had no idea I had hit it so accurately. The image which came into my mind appeared to me in all its vividness on the summit of the Rigi after the sun had gone down. These mountains are really billows, but giant billows. ”

“ We now carry our twenty-seven flasks, our pliers, and a spirit-lamp, to a ledge overlooking the Aletsch glacier, about two hundred feet above the hay-loft, from which ledge the mountain falls almost precipitously to the northeast for about a thousand feet. A gentle wind blows toward us from the northeast—that is, across the crests and snow-fields of the Oberland mountains. We are, therefore, bathed by air which must have been for a good while out of practical contact with either animal or vegetable life. ”

“ He may be overtaken by a gale; and a gale in the wild remote North, far from any shelter,—a gale which drives before it the blinding snow and pitiless icicles,—a gale which sweeps unresisted and irresistible over leagues of frozen snow,—a gale which comes down from the mountain-recesses where the glaciers take their rise,—is something so dread, so ghastly, that the dweller in temperate regions can form no idea of it. ”

“ The glacier dropped its billowy sheet—a soundless tumult of whiteness, a torrent of rolling marble—straight from the blue of heaven to the glassy margin of the road. It seems to gather into its bosom the whole diffused light of the world, so that round about it all objects lose their color. The rocks and hills stand sullen and neutral; the lustre of the sky is turned to blackness. At the little hotel near the glacier I waited for the coach to Brieg, and started thitherward in the early afternoon, sole occupant of the coupé. ”

“ But high above the dark-grey ridge rises a world of mountains which seems to belong to the heavens rather than the earth, so lightly and airily is it poised above the rest of the earth under a canopy of white clouds. It is so far from us that the individual contours are indistinguishable, and it rises like a wall of a universal light blue hue, which, however, is a little deeper than the colour of the sky. ”

“ No vegetable form is seen save the mosses and lichens that cling to the rocks, as within the Arctic Circle. I am on the selvage of the snow—the eternal snow. I walk upon glaciers, and through their translucent mass I behold the lichens growing beneath.
The scene is bleak and desolate, and I am chilled to the marrow of my bones.
Excelsior! excelsior! The highest point is not yet reached. Through drifts of snow and over fields of ice, up steep ledges, along the slippery escarpment that overhangs the giddy abysm, with wearied knees, and panting breath, and frozen fingers, onward and upward I go. ”

“ And now the snow-fields became rose-red in the east—wonderful fairy tales in towers and castles gleamed there—the three snowy peaks then were turned to blood, with a burning, shining flash on top of the middle one. And again in the distance, still unlighted, blue peaks, snow-drifts, and glens, on which the shadows were playing.
Jörgen was lying, with his father's spy-glass, watching the reindeer on the ice-fields.
"Good-by, Miss Inger-Johanna," said Grip. "I am going over the mountains to-night, with one of the men to guide me. There are more people here than the hut will accommodate. ”

“ The black cloud and the red flame fought, serpent against serpent; live ashes, reft by the wind, flew from the fire, and the sudden assaults of the sparks seemed to drive the snow-flakes before them. The ledge, blurred at first in outline, now stood out in bold relief,—a medley of rocks with peaks, crests, and vertebræ. ”

“ It was over an hour since we had landed, and a full night would be scarcely two hours and a half. If we were in a summer latitude, the shorter period of darkness was natural enough. And yet it was still hard to believe as, within ten minutes, it was as bright as Earth-light on the moon. Still clearer and clearer grew the light. The stars were almost gone, the center of the nebula only a faint wisp. There were no clouds to give the colors of sunrise, but a bluish-white radiance seemed to be trembling on the eastern horizon.
And then, like a shot, Rigel came up into the sky. ”

“ At others, looking upward, they saw ridge after ridge and range after range, each one barer and bleaker than the one below it, towering ever up and up like the steps of some titanic stairway which seemed to reach from earth to Heaven, and ever and anon from some ’vantage point of better view they saw far, beyond and above the highest of these, twinkling points of gleaming white, whiter than the cloud-sprays drifting in the mid-most heaven, so high and far away that it seemed as though they had as little kinship with the earth as the clouds themselves. ”

“ The sky is clear between the Helm and Bar, because the air below is warmer and can support a greater quantity of vapour rising from the surface of the earth, and this vapour is driven forward by the Helm-Wind, and ascends up in the rebound to the Bar. In short, the Helm is merely a cloud or cap upon the mountain, the cold air descends from the Helm to the valley, and constitutes the Helm Wind, and when warmed and rarified in the valley, ascends and forms the Bar. ”

“ Often, where the pressure is direct, a few blows only are given with the ax, when the log snaps in an instant with a loud report, followed suddenly by the violent motion of the "jam;" and, ere our bold river-driver is jerked half way to the top of the cliff, scores of logs, in wildest confusion, rush beneath his feet while he yet dangles in air, above the rushing, tumbling mass. ”

“ The slopes of the Rigi are now all covered with orchards and rich pastures, for although snow frequently falls on its summit even in mid-summer, it never lingers there long, owing to the warm rays of the sun striking directly upon it. There are countless points of interest to be seen on this mountain, but the most characteristic of all its legends is connected with the gushing spring of ice-cold water at Rigi-Kaltbad. ”

“ On the spur of the moment it reminded him of a gale he had once experienced in the North Pacific. And for the moment the apparition of the gale rose before his eyes--a gale at night, with a clear sky and under a full moon, the huge seas glinting coldly in the moonlight. ”

“ Now the small, glittering point of light seemed to recede, then to approach and expand, and then to wave and undulate all around him. Sometimes that bright, lightning-like ray would shiver and tremble, and then straighten out with metal-like rigidity, and insinuate itself into his very being like the invisible point of a spear. ”

“ At last, after cutting a passage through the cornice, which hung over the slope like the crest of a great wave about to break, Mr Wills stepped on to the ridge. His description is too thrilling to be omitted. "The instant before, I had been face to face with a blank wall of ice. One step, and the 55 eye took in a boundless expanse of crag and glacier, peak and precipice, mountain and valley, lake and plain. The whole world seemed to lie at my feet. ”

“ Thus we see this Ground very exactly and properly in Thunder and Lightning; for the Flash, or Lightening, or ethereal Blaze, goes always before, for it is the enkindled Salniter; thereupon follows the Stroke in the Flagrat of the Coldness; as you see, as soon as the Stroke is given the astringent Chamber is opened, and a cool Wind follows, and oftentimes Whirling and Wheeling, for the Forms or Nature are awakened, and are as a turning Wheel, and So they carry their Spirit the Wind. ”

“ When you go away beyond the Arctic Circle, you see great fiery streams start up from a fiery arch that stretches right across the sky before you; and from this fiery arch the fiery streams of light shoot up, and then fall back again,—sometimes lasting for a little while, and waving in the sky, to and fro, like a silken curtain of many colors fluttering in the wind ”

“ RAILWAY UP THE RIGI.
Sunrise as seen from the Rigi Kulm is said to be one of the most magnificent sights imaginable. One enthusiastic German writer gives a very glowing account of it, which has been literally translated and is sold in all the book-stores in Lucerne. The translation is so good (?) that it should be universally read. A portion of it is reproduced:
“The starlight night far expanded and aromatic with the herbs of the Alps and the meadow ground, now begins to assume a gray and hazy veil. ”

“ Away down the dimly lighted tunnel, the tiny lights reflected against the crystalline blue, can be seen the smooth surface of the ice, gradually growing bluer and bluer until, at the very entrance, where the sunlight pours down upon it, it becomes nearly transparent, forming a dazzling frame to the bright picture of the glacier, the forest-covered mountain and brilliant sky beyond. ”

“ It is a wonderful thing to see a berg ploughing its way through a frozen sea, slowly but surely, overcoming all obstacles, provided, always, that the water was deep enough to keep its mighty base from grounding. On this day there were dozens in sight. They were in every direction and one could easily understand the hopelessness of a sailing ship's position, beset in these waters, with a gale driving bergs down upon her. ”

“ Suppose the depression to have been at the rate of 5 feet in a century in the mountains and only as many inches in the same time nearer the coast, still, in such areas as the eye could survey at once, comprising a small part only of Switzerland or of the basin of the Rhine, the movement might appear to be uniform and the pre-existing valleys and heights might seem to remain relatively to each other as before. ”

“ Now one of the thoughts that interest the mind as you stand on this mighty mass of ice, and know that, as you stand upon it, you and it are being invisibly, imperceptibly, and regularly moved on together, is what moves it? That the movement of the Gries is for local reasons unusually slow, even for a glacier, heightens the interest of the question submitted to your thought. ”