7.2 CHAMOIS HUNTING. 



ever moves, save the storm and the avalanche. It 

 is not a region of death, for death speaks to us of 

 change; but it is one of numbness and rigidity, of 

 life that, once warm, has become still and stark. It 

 produces an effect as different from ordinary death as 

 the sight of the motionless soldier on the plains of 

 Russia, still standing upright and looking as though 

 yet alive, differs from that feeling awakened by death 

 in any other form. He with the scythe and the 

 hour-glass kills, he destroys life and turns it into 

 death ; but that power which sits on the frozen moun- 

 tain-tops seizes on warm life and enlocks it in a glaze 

 which chills vitality, while the semblance of life re- 

 mains. It is not of death these icy solitudes remind 

 you, but of benumbed life. 



Berger came and roused me from my musing. He 

 took my telescope, and looked at the plains of snow 

 on the distant mountains. He too felt all the magni- 

 ficence of the scene, and gazed around him with de- 

 light. Then awoke in him the longing to climb some 

 vast mountain, where difficulties were to be overcome 

 such as men who had once encountered them like not 

 to think of, and who, while they relate, feel a shud- 

 dering and a fear. " I never was on such a one," he 

 said, " but I should like to venture. If only once I 

 could see such places !" And I told him of the Ortler 

 Spitz, deemed inaccessible until a few years ago, when 

 an old chamois-hunter found a way to its icy summit ; 

 and how a short time afterwards he went up again with 

 his son, that he too might find the path when the father 



