68 CHAMOIS HUNTING. 



the mountains, where, just visible among the rocks, the 

 deep blue of the Soen Lake showed how clear the air 

 was, and how bright the sky. Opposite this lake the 

 sides of the Miesing were covered with the dark green of 

 the latschen ; but nearer to where we stood all was deso- 

 lation : — against the sky the barren and blasted rock, 

 and thence to its foot a bed of loose rolling stones, cold 

 and monotonous in hue. But it was towards the dis- 

 tant mountains that I turned and gazed, and yet never 

 could see enough. And then again I looked at them 

 through my glass, and peered into their dark places, and 

 at their bold projections, and at their very highest pin- 

 nacles, as though I might at last be enabled to unravel 

 the mystery — to discover something that might clear the 

 doubts, and so remove the strange awe that hung over 

 and around them. And still I looked, and watched, and 

 pondered, and the spell that bound my gaze grew stronger, 

 and I could not turn away. For me mountains have a 

 fascination ; and in their presence I sit down, and with 

 fixed look scan their unexplored summits, not in won- 

 der, but with an overwhelming sense of awe at the frozen 

 stillness of their deserts, so far beyond the sphere of all 

 human sympathy, — where all life has ceased, and where 

 nothing 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 pro- 

 duces 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 mountain-tops seizes on warm 



