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The high snow-clad peaks of the Rocky Mountains on the one side check and condense all the moisture that comes from the Atlantic; the Sierra Nevada and the Wahsatch range on the other, running parallel with them to the west, check and condense all the moisture that comes from the Pacific coast.
Thus the long hours went by till at length when we were near the land the moon sank, and we sailed on through the twilight. Then came the dawn, and there in front of us we saw the lovely strand green with palms within a ring of snow-clad mountains, two of them the great peaks that we had seen from our isle.
Underneath, its beams passed faintly over the blue ice and the sides of the snow-clad mountains, whose tops shot up like huge icicles all about, with here and there a star sparkling on the very tip of one.
They were either playing at a game of tag, or were having a peep-show among the bushes, hiding for a moment in some leafy cluster, then dashing in pursuit of one another in the most frolicksome way. I crept in under the arches of the snow-clad bushes to watch their caperings more closely, but the birds at once quieted down, and went about their more prosaic vocation of grub gathering.
So the discouraged party, animated by Mackenzie, pushed on, climbed over the dividing mountains, and came upon the head-waters of a stream flowing westward, the one now called Fraser River. After following it for several days, they struck off through dense forests, sometimes on dizzy trails over snow-clad mountains, until they reached a rapid river.
For a doom is laid upon them, never to be still again, till they rest at the North Pole itself, the still axle of the spinning world; and sink in death around it, and become white snow-clad ghosts. But will they live again, those chilled air-mothers? Yes, they must live again. For all things move for ever; and not even ghosts can rest.
We plodded on, two or three hours longer, and at last the Lake burst upon us a noble sheet of blue water lifted six thousand three hundred feet above the level of the sea, and walled in by a rim of snow-clad mountain peaks that towered aloft full three thousand feet higher still! It was a vast oval, and one would have to use up eighty or a hundred good miles in traveling around it.
It is prettily situated, very clean, with regular streets, but without any special objects of interest. The splendid view of the snow-clad Alps, and the fertile valley of the Po, as seen from the monastery, fully repaid us for the day given to Turin. We leave Italy in the morning. It is impossible not to like the country and to be deeply interested in its future.
I then perceived that what I had taken for a bride-cake was really an admirably executed model of a lofty range of mountains, whose snow-clad peaks were not unlike the familiar sugar pinnacles and minarets. "These are the Himalayas, or at least the Surinam branch of them," he remarked, "showing the principal passes between India and Afghanistan. It is an excellent model.
Stephen laid siege to Oxford, and pressed it so closely that once more Maud took to flight. It was midwinter. The ground was covered with snow. Dressing herself from head to foot in white, and accompanied by three knights similarly attired, she slipped out of a postern in the hope of being unseen against the whiteness of the snow-clad surface.
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