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Westward, through the boundless steppes, whither or why we knew not; but that the All-Father had sent us forth. And behind us the rosy snow-peaks died into ghastly grey, lower and lower as every evening came; and before us the plains spread infinite, with gleaming salt-lakes, and ever fresh tribes of gaudy flowers.
Half veiled by the heat that rose quiveringly from the fiery canyon below, the domain of Burnt Ridge stretched away before him, until, lifted in successive terraces hearsed and plumed with pines, it was at last lost in the ghostly snow-peaks. But the practical Josephine seized the opportunity to try once more to awaken the slumbering memory of her pupil.
The latter, being a mere man, had been influenced by the situation of the town, the rapid, foaming river, the placid green lake, the high mountains all around, the snow-peaks to the east, the ancient castle overlooking everything, and the quaint streets with the pavements up at the first floors.
They were all of a breed, a bigoted breed; all dull, blind worms, insensible to the beauty of self-sacrifice, or the purity of affection. All, self-sufficient dolts, as far removed, as immeasurably divided from her whom he loved, as the gloomy lanes of this close city lay below the clear loveliness of the snow-peaks! For, after all, he had lifted his eyes to the mountains.
They come from the country to which our republic is indebted for a third of its territory, including the ground on which we stand; from the land which has taught us that the most scholarly devotion to the languages and learning of the cloistered past is compatible with leadership in the practical application of modern science to the arts of life; from the island whose language and literature have found a new field and a vigorous growth in this region; from the last seat of the holy Roman Empire; from the country which, remembering a monarch who made an astronomical observation at the Greenwich Observatory, has enthroned science in one of the highest places in its government; from the peninsula so learned that we have invited one of its scholars to come and tells us of our own language; from the land which gave birth to Leonardo, Galileo, Torricelli, Columbus, Volta what an array of immortal names! from the little republic of glorious history which, breeding men rugged as its eternal snow-peaks, has yet been the seat of scientific investigation since the day of the Bernoullis; from the land whose heroic dwellers did not hesitate to use the ocean itself to protect it against invaders, and which now makes us marvel at the amount of erudition compressed within its little area; from the nation across the Pacific, which, by half a century of unequalled progress in the arts of life, has made an important contribution to evolutionary science through demonstrating the falsity of the theory that the most ancient races are doomed to be left in the rear of the advancing age in a word, from every great centre of intellectual activity on the globe I see before me eminent representatives of that world advance in knowledge which we have met to celebrate.
At the far end, the guides had driven iron stakes deep into the snow-wall, so that, by means of the great rope attached, they could haul themselves up the massive snow-front, out on to the jagged summit of the pass, naked to heaven, where the Marienhutte hid among the naked rocks. Round about, spiked, slashed snow-peaks pricked the heaven. Gerald might have found this rope.
From the balcony of our rooms at the Bellevue, the long range of the Bernese Oberland shows its white summits for a moment in the slant sunshine, and then the clouds shut down, not to lift again for two days. Yet it looks warmer on the snow-peaks than in Berne, for summer sets in in Switzerland with a New England chill and rigor.
Then shouts went up 'Land! 'Mountains! 'Snow-peaks! The St Peter glided forward noiseless as a bird on the wing. Inlets and harbours, turquoise-green and silent, opened along a jagged, green and alabaster shore.
The Gorner-Grat is a rounded ridge of rock, entirely encirled by glaciers and snow-peaks. The panorama from it is unexcelled in Switzerland. Returning down the rocky steep, I descried, solitary in that great waste of rock and snow, the form of a lady whom I supposed I had left sleeping at the inn, overcome with the fatigue of yesterday's tramp.
The Gorner-Grat is a rounded ridge of rock, entirely encirled by glaciers and snow-peaks. The panorama from it is unexcelled in Switzerland. Returning down the rocky steep, I descried, solitary in that great waste of rock and snow, the form of a lady whom I supposed I had left sleeping at the inn, overcome with the fatigue of yesterday's tramp.
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