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Hence their place in these high stations of the world is taken by the gay and airy butterflies, which have lighter bodies and a much bigger expanse of wing-area to buoy them up. In the valleys and plains the bee competes at an advantage with the butterflies for all the sweets of life: but in this broad sub-glacial belt on the mountain-sides the butterflies in turn have things all their own way.
His mother, Emma, the Count, Antoine, Gillie, Susan every one had a share in his thoughts, as he lay wakeful and watching on the giddy ledge and Nita, as a great under-current like the sub-glacial rivers, kept flowing continually, and twining herself through all.
A sub-glacial lake among the heights above had burst its icy barriers, and, down the same couloir from which the smaller avalanche had sprung, a very ocean of boulders, mud, ice, and debris came crashing and roaring with a noise like the loudest thunder, with this difference, that there was no intermission of the roar for full quarter of an hour; only, at frequent intervals, a series of pre-eminent peals were heard, when boulders, from six to ten feet in diameter, met with obstacles, and dashed them aside, or broke themselves into atoms.
The territories they inhabit now are still, or recently were, sub-glacial, as to their physical features; their arts and implements are those of the neolithic age; and, notwithstanding their racial differences, and the distances which separate them, their modes of life and social institutions bear a striking likeness.
It seemed to be flung up with great force. For a moment it remained poised. Then it crashed over on its side to the accompaniment of a cracking, splitting roar, like the bombardment of massed artillery. Steve waited for nothing. Even with the roar of sub-glacial thunders hammering on his ear drums, he rushed to the man's assistance. Oolak turned to his own dogs.
"Yes, you must have read in Murray that eerie story of the guide that actually tumbled, though not very deep, into the centre of the glacier, and found his way back to light down the bed of a sub-glacial torrent, with no worse result than a broken arm."
"I doubt it not, Antoine," said Lawrence, gazing with feelings of awe into a terrible split in the ice, whose beautiful light-blue sides deepened into intense blackness as they were lost to vision in an abyss, out of which arose the deep-toned gurgling of sub-glacial streams; "but you must not forget that this is quite new to me, and my feet are not yet aware of the precise grip with which they must hold on to so slippery a foundation."
Low grumbling noises and gurglings were heard underfoot, as if great boulders were dropping into buried lakes from the roofs of sub-glacial caverns, while, on the surface, the glacier was strewn here and there with debris which had fallen from steep parts of the mountains that rose beside them into the clouds.
The night advanced; the uneasy grindings of the ice increased; the tinkling of a thousand snow-born rills filled the air with liquid melody. The sub-glacial murmuring of many waters filled many hearts with anxious care, and numerous households near the river's brink sat up the live-long night to watch perhaps to pray.
It could not mar the beauty of the picturesque surroundings, or dim the sun's glitter on the ice-pinnacles, or taint the purity of these delicate blue depths into which Emma and Nita gazed for the first time with admiration and surprise while they listened to the mysterious murmurings of sub-glacial waters with mingled feelings of curiosity and awe.
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