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The wind must roar awfully there in the winter; but the mountains stand away with their avalanches, and all the summer long keep the cold off the grassy fields. The same evening, he was already weary. The next morning it rained. It rained fiercely all day. He would leave the place on the morrow. In the evening it began to clear up. He walked out. The sun was setting.
It must be entirely owing to this, that the Alps do not break out on Europe generally, and tear it in pieces. But the mountains how shall I give you the least idea of them? Old, sombre, haggard genii, half veiled in clouds, belted with pines, worn and furrowed with storms and avalanches, but not as yet crowned with snow.
I was allowing the umbrella to remain lost, but the men murmured, and with reason, for in this exposed region we stood in peculiar need of protection against avalanches; so I went into camp and detached a strong party to go after the missing article. The difficulties of the next morning were severe, but our courage was high, for our goal was near.
Heard the avalanches falling every five minutes. From where we stood on the Wengern Alp we had all these in view on one side; on the other, the clouds rose up from the opposite valley, curling up perpendicular precipices, like the foam of the ocean of hell during a spring tide; it was white and sulphury, and immeasurably deep in appearance.... Arrived at the Grindelwald; dined; mounted again, and rode to the higher glacier like a frozen hurricane; starlight beautiful, but a devil of a path.
The labour of dragging the guns wore out the peasants; then the troops were invited a hundred at a time to take a turn at the ropes, and were exhilarated by martial airs played by the bands, or by bugles and drums sounding the charge at the worst places of the ascent. The track sometimes ran along narrow ledges where a false step meant death, or where avalanches were to be feared.
"They are far round on the other side of the mountain by this time," said Seppi, "where the sun has not yet had so much chance to melt the snow and start avalanches. They could not have been harmed by this one, for it fell on our side of the mountain." "Let us start home anyway," said Leneli, "even if it is early. I can't wait until night to know that Mother and Baby Roseli are safe."
From roof, ledges, and window-sills, miniature avalanches suddenly descended on the startled pedestrians, and the air was here and there loaded with falling flakes from wild hurrying masses of clouds, the rear-guard of the storm that the biting northwest wind was driving seaward. It was early in the afternoon, and the great thoroughfare was almost deserted.
It brought on therefore a period of intellectual upheaval and of drift, such as was once passed through by the planet itself. What had long stood locked and immovable began to move; what had been high sank out of sight; what had been low was lifted. The mental hearing, listening as an ear placed amid still mountains, could gather into itself from afar the slip and fall of avalanches.
Nevertheless, we have a strong belief that the mighty schemes of Providence, like the arrangements of external nature, will all in the end become dispensers of good; that those evil systems which have burdened the earth, like those mountains of ice and snow which rise on its surface, have their uses, though as yet we stand too near them, and too much within the sphere of their tempests and their avalanches, fully to comprehend these uses.
Rugged torrents and avalanches from the main wind-flood overhead were roaring down the side canyons and over the cliffs, arousing the rocks and the trees and the streams alike into glorious hurrahing enthusiasm, shaking the whole Valley into one huge song.
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