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The snow-peaks did not hold themselves aloof, in aristocratic reserve; they nestled close around, in a friendly, sociable way; guides, with the ropes and axes and other implements of their fearful calling slung about their persons, roosted in a long line upon a stone wall in front of the hotel, and waited for customers; sun-burnt climbers, in mountaineering costume, and followed by their guides and porters, arrived from time to time, from breakneck expeditions among the peaks and glaciers of the High Alps; male and female tourists, on mules, filed by, in a continuous procession, hotelward-bound from wild adventures which would grow in grandeur every time they were described at the English or American fireside, and at last outgrow the possible itself.
"It would be monstrous. You must not. You will not. I shall not let you." Vivian count stood on the first hill. The brick walls of the business center filled the levels below, and Mrs. Weatherbee's windows, like Tisdale's, commanded the inner harbor rimmed by Duwamish Head, with a broader sweep of the Sound beyond framed in wooded islands and the snow-peaks of the Olympic Peninsula.
It was a still, hot morning; oppressive as though a storm were brooding. A filmy haze lay upon the lower valley bottom, and the ground gave forth a shimmer of heat. Even the amphitheatre of dazzling snow-peaks omitted to look cool against the cloudless blue, while the coppery-terraced cliffs seemed actually to glow as though red hot.
In the topmost story of the castle the Lady Aurora occupied a spacious apartment of several large rooms looking southward. The windows projected oriel-wise over the garden below, and there was a splendid view from them both up and down and across the river. The opposite side of the valley was steep, but not very high. Far away snow-peaks were visible.
Scraping away the incrustation, we find that we are in the Tyrol, high hills on all sides, no snow in the valley, a bright morning, and the snow-peaks are soon rosy in the sunrise. It is just as we expected, little villages under the hills, and slender church spires with brick-red tops. At nine o'clock we are in Innsbruck, at the foot of the Brenner. No snow yet.
In his ignorance of Italian he had caught no inkling of the peril that lucky shot had brought upon me, nor did I choose to enlighten him. The shadow of the mountain was stretching more than halfway across the valley, and in the slanting light the rosy tinge of the crags appeared to be melting and suffusing the snow-peaks beyond, when my father walked into the camp unannounced.
In a border, beyond the lawn, spring flowers were awake; the bank was starred with white violets and wild-strawberry blossoms; and through a gap in the ilex trees beyond, she had a vision of far hills and flashing snow-peaks, blue-white in the sun, cobalt in shadow. Overhead, among the higher branches, a bird was trilling out an ecstatic love-song.
The contour of the snow-cap not only appeared indented, as if by valleys and promontories, but brilliant points were discerned outside the white area, attributed to isolated snow-peaks. Still more elevated, if similarly explained, must be the "ice island" first seen in a comparatively low latitude by Dawes in January, 1865.
It is so entirely ringed with snow-peaks that there is only one way to approach it for a landing, and that is through the canyon edging Thusis Woods. Now the wire cable blocks this canyon. An approaching airplane therefore hangs aloft and signals to the cable-guards, who lower the cable until it sags sufficiently to free the aerial passage-way between the cliffs.
The trail led him to the bank of the Columbia, some distance below the encampment. He looked out over the blue river sweeping majestically on, the white snow-peaks, the canyons deep in the shadows of afternoon, the dense forest beyond the river extending away to the unknown and silent North as far as his eyes could reach. "It is wonderful, wonderful!" he thought.
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