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Updated: May 21, 2025
Once again, for the purpose of taking away all solitariness of feeling, and of connecting myself, albeit only in fancy, with the proper gladness of the time, let me think of the comfortable family dinners now being drawn to a close, of the good wishes uttered, and the presents made, quite valueless in themselves, yet felt to be invaluable from the feelings from which they spring; of the little children, by sweetmeats lapped in Elysium; and of the pantomime, pleasantest Christmas sight of all, with the pit a sea of grinning delight, the boxes a tier of beaming juvenility, the galleries, piled up to the far-receding roof, a mass of happy laughter which a clown's joke brings down in mighty avalanches.
Below 12,000 to 13,000 feet the mountain-sides were covered with a dense scrub of rhododendron bushes, except where broken by rocks, landslips, and torrents: above this the winter's snow lay deep, and black rocks and small glaciers, over which avalanches were constantly falling with a sullen roar, forbade all attempts to proceed.
Luckily many evergreens grew along the slope and using them as supports they toiled slowly upward. Now and then, in spite of every precaution, they sent down heaps of snow that rumbled as it fell into the pass. Every time one of these miniature avalanches fell Robert shivered.
The plushy lawns that lay in my path served to soothe my morning haste. The sod in many places was starred with daisies and blue gentians, over which I lingered. I traced the paths of the ancient glaciers over many a shining pavement, and marked the gaps in the upper forests that told the power of the winter avalanches.
I shall remember, so long as I remember anything, the three avalanches I saw and heard thundering down the side of Mount Pembroke as I sat on a boat in the glassy waters of Milford Sound. In many and many an hour I shall see Wet-Jacket Arm and Dusky Sound again with their vast precipices, luxuriant forests, and rejoicing cataracts.
The streets were roadways from house-front to house-front, smooth, elastic levels of thickly-bedded, triply-frozen snow; and the foot passengers, muffled to the eyes against the morning cold, came and went among the vehicles in the middle of the street, or crept along close to the house-walls, to keep out of the light avalanches of an overnight snow that slipped here and there from the steep tin roofs.
Just think of his wanting to stop me on the edge of a little shelf over that frightful chasm, and take away the guide from the head of my mule to help him get up avalanches! I warn you, if ever you visit the Alps, that a travelling companion who has not the slightest idea what fear is will give you many a commotion.
But when he was told that the site was exposed to the full force of the avalanches descending from the upper part of the mountain in winter, and would speedily be swept away, the project of the memorial pillar was abandoned, and the tablet was inserted, instead, in the front wall of the village church, where it reads as follows:
On those glaciers where, owing to the irregularity of the bottom over which the ice flows, these fractures are very numerous, it may happen that all the detritus brought upon the surface of the glacier by avalanches finds its way to the floor of the ice.
Now is it strange that Sinai should have excited reverence and dread? It is indeed a weird land. Vast and stern stand the mountains, with their five granite peaks pointing to the sky. Avalanches like those of the Alps, but of sand, not of snow, rush down their naked sides with a clear tinkling sound.
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