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scene! We were about 300 feet above the clouds; overbead tbe 
blue sky unsullied by a single speck. It was exactly such a 
scene that Sir William Macgregor looked down on from the summit of 
Mount Knutsford at 11,000 feet, only he was 3,000 feet above the 
clouds instead of 300 feet. But his additional height was no 
advantage whatever. We could have seen no more from the crest of 
Everest or Chimborazo. Once above the clouds you gain nothing by 
further ascension, so far as scenery is concerned. The view from the 
top of Bellenden-Ker, either in clouds or sunshine, is quite equal to 
that seen from the loftiest heights of the Owen Stanley Kange, 
judging by Sir William's description, and even liberally filling up the 
far too meagre outline he gives to us in his report. Doubtless he 
would have supplied a much more graphic description had he been 
quite sure it was compatible with the usual solemn and soulless 
language of oflQcial documents. He compared the clouds below him to 
" an Arctic world of frozen snow," and this applies accurately to the 
scene which Broadbent and myself witnessed from the centre peak. 
How unspeakably poor and mean in comparison with that sublime 
reality are all the most gorgeous fancies of even the finest imagina- 
tions ! You dare not speak nor cherish an ignoble thought, standing 
there in the presence of that transcendent picture suddenly unfolded 
before you by the hand of the Almighty Artist. One vast waste 
ocean of magnificent clouds — purple and blue and white and red and 
golden — stretching away to the edge of the remote horizon, all rippled 
into fantastic, motionless waves ; here and there a dark mass like some 
solitary island in the eternal sea, and to the right the dark lone crest 
of Chooreechillum rising a hundred feet from the surrounding cumuli 
into the overarching blue. Eastward the cloud ocean stretched away 
in long low waves with rippled crests, until it ended in a border of 
gorgeous purple, above that a long straight amber-edged billow of 
snowy white, and over and above all, " through the abyss of the 
immense concave, radiant with million constellations," the calm clear 
blue immeasurable azure, the pathway to Eternity. 
-Northward, beneath the sunlight, clouds rose in gigantic shadowy 
shapes like hills torn from their foundations and hurled in wild con- 
fusion from the skies in some empyrean combat of the gods and demons. 
Mountains toppling evermore 
Into seas without a shore ; 
Seas that restlessly aspire, 
Surging into skies of tire. 
And slowly two of these enormous vapours rolled apart, disclosing 
far away a long avenue with descending streams of soft gray light, 
like rivers from the Sulphur Throne of Pluto, spanned by myriad 
rainbows, and falling silently into bottomless ravines of purple snow. 
And from the many-coloured abyss, driven upwards by sub-vaporous 
winds, there drifted multitudes of small white clouds, rising from 
the red depths like birds from the funeral pyre of some celestial 
Memnon, around whose last couch all the mourning Cherubim 
and Seraphim had spread the dazzling glories of God's everlasting 
Universe. 
Three hundred feet below us, down the green face of the moun- 
tain, across the slopes strewed with flowers and living leaves, the waves 
of that cloud ocean rippled noiseless on the echoless shore. And around 
and over all was the silence of the grave, save the soft sad ^olian 
