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"There are some of them on the ice ledges of the Ortler nearly 10,000 feet above sea level, in places which it is by way of an achievement for the amateur climber to reach with guides and ropes and porters, and nothing to take care of but his own skin.
All this I had seen, and then we came to a little town called Bex; and here, from too much expenditure of enthusiasm perhaps, I was confined for weeks with a raging fever. "One day, when the fever left me weak and feeble as a child, who should enter but the good pastor Ortler.
Griselda was a tall stately girl, with blue laughing eyes, and curls of pale brown, and Thorwald was a student at Geneva. Pastor Ortler was still the same, preaching to his little flock, and giving freely of his means, his wife only slightly older.
As a rule, gaiety was not the character failing in any party that Mrs. Kuhn belonged to, but when at last, after climbing what was said to be the finest carriage-pass in Europe, the carriage turned the last shoulder, where the glacier of the Ortler Spitze tumbled its huge mass down upon the road, even Mrs.
The Alps were all there now cold, unreal, stretching like a phantom line of snowy peaks, from the sharp pyramids of Monte Viso and the Grivola in the west to the distant Bernina and the Ortler in the east. Supreme among them towered Monte Rosa queenly, triumphant, gazing down in proud pre-eminence, as she does when seen from any point of the Italian plain. There is no mountain like her.
He has the names of all the peaks done in iron at his shop, and if you take your alpenstock to him, he will, for a few francs, brand on it all the names it will hold, from the Ortler to Mont Blanc. My friend was weak enough to have all the ascents he had intended to make, branded on the alpenstock he bought the moment he entered Switzerland. They always buy an alpenstock the first thing.
Monte Adamello and the Ortler, the cleft of the Brenner, and the sharp peaks of the Venetian Alps are all distinctly visible. An eagle flying straight from our eyrie might traverse Lombardy and light among the snow-fields of the Valtelline between sunrise and sundown. Nor is the prospect tame to southward.
"'This young friend was very ill; you would not have had me leave him? "'Oh, no, papa, but' when the little Griselda stopped suddenly, and threw a half-defiant glance at my face, and Thorwald stood measuring me with his great black eyes. "Hardly recovered from my illness, I stayed with the good pastor Ortler through Christmas week, and a month afterwards. Never did I pass pleasanter days.
Whereupon the whole Italian army by general orders issued on November 1st was directed to press down upon the Austrian army as a great, solid wave of men from the Ortler Alps to the sea.
Sweeping around in a wider circle from that point, we saw, beyond the Durrenstein, the snow-covered pile of the Gross-Glockner; the crimson bastions of the Rothwand appeared to the north, behind Tofana; then the white slopes that hang far away above the Zillerthal; and, nearer, the Geislerspitze, like five fingers thrust into the air; behind that, the distant Oetzthaler Mountain, and just a single white glimpse of the highest peak of the Ortler by the Engadine; nearer still we saw the vast fortress of the Sella group and the red combs of the Rosengarten; Monte Marmolata, the Queen of the Dolomites, stood before us revealed from base to peak in a bridal dress of snow; and southward we looked into the dark rugged face of La Civetta, rising sheer out of the vale of Agordo, where the Lake of Alleghe slept unseen.
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