It was as if there had
been innumerable torrents dashing down the precipice into the
valley--arrested by a mighty hurricane as they hurried along, and
wrought into the wildest forms by the fury of the tempest, and then
suddenly congealed, leaving a sea or river of ice, framed in with
lofty peaks and snowy summits, cataracts and avalanches, clouds and
storms, a wonderful combination of the grand, the terrible, and the
sublime.
Franz understood his business of guide too well to let me loiter as I
wished. "These fissures are the chief danger," he said; and, holding
out his small hand, he grasped mine with the tenacity of one not
accustomed to let anything slip through his fingers. A girdle of
imperfectly frozen snow borders this sea; and Franz never planted his
feet till he had first ascertained the nature of the surface with his
pole. Some of these fissures are of an amazing depth, and, taking out
my watch, I tried to fathom one of them by dropping large fragments of
granite; and calculating by the time that elapsed before reaching the
bottom, we judged it to be over five hundred feet.
Franz had hurried us; now, he stopped, and bade us look above us. We
did so, and were amply repaid for all our toil. To try to describe it
would be in vain; and still the distinct outline is indelibly
impressed upon my mind, and I am confident will never be effaced. We
were standing in the midst of the rough waves and yawning abysses of
this frozen sea; while almost perpendicularly from its brink the
mountains rose, clothed with scanty herbage, and adorned with the tiny
crimson blossoms of the rhododendron that bloomed upon their sides.
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