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The country was generally lovely, being well wooded, with numerous lakelets, now rising into softly rounded knolls, and occasionally opening out into a wide, fair landscape. The soil was of rich loam, and the vegetation luxuriant, sprinkled with flowers of many tints.
One of the most beautiful things to be seen on the glacier is the myriads of minute and intensely brilliant radiant lights burning in rows on the banks of streams and pools and lakelets from the tips of crystals melting in the sun, making them look as if bordered with diamonds. These gems are rayed like stars and twinkle; no diamond radiates keener or more brilliant light.
Like the other islands it was quite destitute of trees, but the low bush was luxuriantly dense, and filled, they were told, with herds of reindeer and musk-oxen. Myriads of wild-fowl from the lordly swan to the twittering sandpiper swarmed among its sedgy lakelets, while grouse and ptarmigan were to be seen in large flocks on its uplands.
Clumps of trees dotted the undulating surface, and lakelets glittering in the bright sunshine spread out in sheets of dazzling whiteness. The Starving Bull set himself busily to work preparing our dinner. What it would have been under ordinary circumstances, I cannot state; but, unfortunately for its success on the present occasion, its preparation was attended with unusual drawbacks.
The circumstances were briefly these: Some three months ago M. Pelet had, on the occasion of his fete, given the boys a treat, which treat consisted in a party of pleasure to a certain place of public resort in the outskirts of Brussels, of which I do not at this moment remember the name, but near it were several of those lakelets called etangs; and there was one etang, larger than the rest, where on holidays people were accustomed to amuse themselves by rowing round it in little boats.
In the farther end is a beautiful grove of cottonwoods, and between us and the cotton-woods the little stream widens out into three clear lakelets with bottoms of smooth rock. Beyond the cottonwoods the brook tumbles in a series of white, shining cascades from heights that seem immeasurable.
The Prime Minister's new house, near the British Legation, is situated in beautiful gardens, set off with pretty lakelets and terraced grounds, which give slopes for flowing waterfalls. These gardens, in common with all in the town, are tenanted every year by nightingales of sweet song.
Many lakes and lakelets in it, as usual hereabouts; the loitering waters straggle, all over that region, into meshes of lakes. Reinsberg itself, Village and Schloss, stands on the edge of a pleasant Lake, last of a mesh of such: the SUMMARY, or outfall, of which, already here a good strong brook or stream, is called the RHEIN, Rhyn or Rein; and gives name to the little place.
But who can hope to describe, with adequate force, the joyful feelings of Benjamin Vane as he moved slily about the lakelets of Paradise Isle in the water-tramp? The novelty of the situation was so great. The surrounding circumstances were so peculiar.
We counted seven pools, or lakelets, in addition and similar to our own three to the northward, one to the eastward, two to the southward, and one to the south-westward of our own; but the one in which the Mercury floated seemed to be the largest of them all.
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