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He sent a message down the speaking tube to Murgatroyd, who was below among his beloved engines, and the next moment sun and clouds and ice-peaks had disappeared and nothing was visible save the all-enveloping silver-grey mist. For several minutes they remained silent, watching and wondering what they would find beneath the veil which hid the surface of Venus from their view.
"No, mother," Sylvia replied. "He never spoke of you. The ideas have been growing in my mind for a long time, and to-day " She raised her head, and turning slightly, looked up to where just behind her the ice-peaks of the Aiguilles du Midi and de Blaitière soared into the moonlit sky. "To-day the end came. I became certain that I must go away. I am very sorry, mother."
The location of Pyramid Harbor is very beautiful, a wind-sheltered nook, a curving shore, covered with pebbles, alder-clad heights just behind, and dimly-flashing ice-peaks peeping out of the mist just over the shoulder of a huge green rock-slope.
They found its surface covered with eternal snow, broken into mighty glaciers, jagged with precipitous ice-peaks; and to this land of almost perpetual winter, where the mercury freezes during ten months in the year, and where the sun remains four months beneath the horizon, they subsequently gave the appropriate and vernacular name of Spitzbergen.
All the world believed him to be dead, and he lived as a shadow among shadows. The wild and solitary ice-peaks he sometimes scaled seemed to him the unsubstantial phantasmagoria of a troubled sleep. He wondered with a dull amazement if the crevasses which yawned before him would swallow him up, or the shuddering violence of an avalanche bury him beneath it.
The chief feature of the Bernina what makes it a dreary pass enough in summer, but infinitely beautiful in winter is its breadth; illimitable undulations of snow-drifts; immensity of open sky; unbroken lines of white, descending in smooth curves from glittering ice-peaks. A glacier hangs in air above the frozen lakes, with all its green-blue ice-cliffs glistening in intensest light.
All those eager anticipations which had so shortened his journey this morning, which during the last two years had so often raised before his eyes through the shimmering heat of the Red Sea cool visions of ice-peaks and sharp spires of rock, had crumbled and left him desolate. Anticipations of disaster had taken their place.
They had hardly started, however, when the sound of sleigh-bells reached them, coming from far over the snow, and before they could tell where it was, who should appear, sailing along over the ice-peaks, but Santa Claus himself, in his own sleigh, all packed with Christmas things, his eight reindeer shining in the moonlight and his bells jingling merrily.
He seemed to decide on the latter, for, standing up, he fixed his eyes on Tommy and took a step across Johnny's prostrate body, with his mouth open wider than before, his eyes glaring more fiercely, and with a roar and a growl that made the ice-peaks shed a shower of icicles. Then it was that Tommy seemed to have become a different boy.
They had to work their way along slowly between jagged ice-peaks, and sometimes they came to places which it seemed they could never get over, but by dint of pushing and hauling and pulling, they always got over in the end.