44 CHAMOIS HUNTING. 



power seems to rivet your staring eyes upon them, 

 and you gaze on with awe, and dread, and longing ! 



Ay, with awe ! for they stand before you, those huge 

 forms, in overpowering, unparticipating stillness. All 

 is motionless. Nothing stirs that forms a part of them. 

 A shadow may flit across their face, but that is an extra- 

 neous thing, and when it has swept by, there they are, 

 still in the same cold, rigid imperturbability. If only 

 a tree were there, with its softer outline, and its boughs, 

 though not moving, at least conveying the feeling that 

 they might move, as being a thing with life ! But no, 

 the hard lines of those fixed features are unrelieved by 

 one milder form ; stillness, unwaning stillness, sits on 

 them everlastingly, like Death ! And yet you gaze on 

 them with longing ; the longing that with your vision 

 you could penetrate what is beyond. It is a yearning 

 such as the soul feels to know of that "other side" 

 which will be seen only after death. 



On the finest day too the mists will suddenly arise, 

 wrapping all in their flowing cloud-like folds. When 

 thus overtaken in the mountains by dense fog, if it last 

 you may look upon it as your shroud. 



In crossing the barren heights of the Valtelline, I 

 remember to have met, on the summit, a little altar 

 raised by friendly hands from the stones which lay 

 strewn around, in a niche of which shone a human 

 skull and a heap of bones. They had belonged to a 

 contrabandista, who, while smuggling his wares across 

 this scene of desolation, had been overtaken by the 

 mists sweeping upward from the valley, and, unable 



