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Updated: June 2, 2025
In moments of sober reflection our resolutions are like prisms of basalt, that will not be riven by the lightning, but which in the hour of real trial prove to be ice-crystals that a sunbeam can dissolve.
I had put on my slippers and my dressing-gown. I wiped away a tear with which the north wind blowing over the quay had obscured my vision. A bright fire was leaping in the chimney of my study. Ice-crystals, shaped like fern-leaves, were sprouting over the windowpanes and concealed from me the Seine with its bridges and the Louvre of the Valois.
The sun had been shining all day, and now the sky was all aglow with the last rays of the setting sun. The heath lay shrouded in a blue-gray mist, and sparkling ice-crystals were flying through the clear winter air. When he passed Helenenthal he saw two sledges moving towards the manor-house laden with fir branches.
We may picture a far-reaching waste of snow, wind-furrowed until it resembles a billowy white sea frozen motionless. The wind blows half a gale and the air is full of fine ice-crystals that sting the face viciously. The sun, lying low on the southern horizon, seems a mere frozen globe, with lustrous pink crescents encircling it. One day the wind backs and shifts. A change portends.
The temperature being below freezing point, the drops of moisture in this wall of vapor were congealed into ice-crystals, which glittered like gold in the sunlight and gave back all the colors of the rainbow.
Fortunately, the day had been warm enough to loosen the ice-crystals so as to admit of hollows being dug in the rotten portions of the blocks, thus enabling me to pick my way with far less difficulty than I had anticipated.
The greatest difficulty that was experienced was due to the accumulation of rime on the instruments. In low temperatures everything became covered with ice-crystals, deposited from the air, which eventually grew into huge blocks. Sometimes these blocks became dislodged and fell, making it dangerous to walk along the decks.
And as I looked the stone opened from its summit to its base; and I saw that the strata within had the form of a tree, and that every minute crystal of which it was formed, particles so fine that grains of sand would have been coarse in comparison with, them, and every atom composing its mass, were stamped with this same tree-image, and bore the shape of the ice-crystals, of the ferns and of the colossal palm-leaves I had seen.
This ice-chamber consists of a grotto from 30 to 40 fathoms long, decked with ice-crystals, pillars of ice, and cascades of the same material, the floor being composed of ice as smooth as glass. In the summer, pleasure-parties assemble in the cave and amuse themselves with the game of Eisschiessen, so popular in Upper Styria as a winter diversion.
Along the banks of the stream, we followed it up and up, meeting a varied loveliness which it would take the soul of a Wordsworth or a Ruskin to comprehend or express. To my poor faculty the splendour of the ice-crystals remains the one memorial thing. In those lonely water-courses the sun was gloriously busy, with none to praise him except Charley and me.
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