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Updated: June 28, 2025
Wind prevailed from the northward: the forenoon was cloudless; heavy cumuli in the afternoon. We travelled at first on the right side of the river; but its banks became so mountainous and steep, and the gullies so deep, that we were compelled to cross it at a place where it was very deep, and where our horses and cattle had to swim.
The shorelines, marked by a ribbon of white sand, were seen sweeping around many a bay and promontory in elegant curves, and picturesque islands rising to mountain heights, and some of them capped with pearly cumuli.
In the darkness of the tunnel it remains with me. I see the great mass of white cumuli and against them the dark cedars, the straggling foot-path and steep cliffs. I am impressed with the sweep of the cloud form pressing over and around them.
The weather had been threatening all day, northern and westerly currents contending aloft with the south-east trade-wind of Sikkim, and meeting in strife over the great upper valley of the Ratong. Stately masses of white cumuli wheeled round that gulf of glaciers, partially dissipating in an occasional snow-storm, but on the whole gradually accumulating.
Our memory of these is of beautiful sheets of water, surrounded by the green of mid-June, and over-arched by the blue sky and the fleecy cumuli of a perfect summer day. The characteristic North German landscape was here seen to fine advantage. The color of the cottages and farm-houses harmonizes or contrasts beautifully with the landscape.
"The whole of this time there was a thick fog, which now and then cleared away, though only for brief moments, and enabled us to get a splendid view of the country spread out as a map beneath us, with cumuli clouds floating about. The snow which I mounted was at a very steep slope, and quite hard, nearly ice, on the surface.
There was a well-defined range of cumuli a few degrees above the horizon, and a massive, dark-gray rain-cloud above it, from which depended long, bent fringes overlapping the lower cumuli and partially veiling them; and from time to time sunbeams poured through narrow openings and painted the exposed bosses and fringes in ripe yellow tones, which, with the reflections on the water, made magnificent pictures.
Most vivid is the ordinary shrapnel, which tears a rent through the black volumes of smoke rolling over a smouldering town with a luminous sphere of electric blue. Then from the heavier guns come dense puff-balls of tawny orange, violet, and heliotrope, followed by fleecy little cumuli of purest white.
It came up from the east for full ten miles, an advancing column of tall ghostly cumuli, leaden, above a leaden sea; and slid toward the island, whose lines seemed to leap up once to meet them; fail; then, in a second leap, to plunge the crater-peak high into the mist; and then to sink down again into the western sea, so gently that the line of shore and sea was indistinguishable.
But the way, this afternoon, was clear and easy; and there were no annoyances save from other walkers along the same path. The sun shone brightly at intervals. A fresh breeze swept the wide expanse streaked with purple and green and turned an occasional broken wave-crest toward the western light. Some large cumuli were abroad white, or less white, or even darkling, the first windy sky of autumn.
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