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At this moment, a company of travellers crossed the snow-field where the Maiden sat; they had bound themselves firmly together with ropes, in order to form a large body on the smooth ice-field by the deep abyss. "Worms!" said she, "as if you were lords of creation!" She turned from them and looked mockingly upon the deep valley, where the cars were rushing by.
Then half a mile away, but advancing rapidly, appeared a strange turmoil, and in the sunlight, a stretch of sea, acres in extent, was churned into white foam, looking like some fairy ice- or snow-field. Above this, at a height of about ten feet, glittered a palpitating silver canopy, almost blinding in its sparkle and its sheen. "What is that?" asked Colin, wondering.
The two great draw-backs to this Ski-ing are, firstly, the expense and, secondly, the difficulty of breathing. The expense is unavoidable because the carriage of building materials, food, etc. to such a height must necessarily entail high prices. Glacier Ski-ing, except on the snow-field near the Joch, also usually necessitates the employment of Guides.
Over the heights and over the far green valley hung the golden glory of the autumn day. The great snow-field sparkled in the bright sunlight, and the two grey rocky peaks rose in their ancient majesty against the dark blue sky.
The first night was bad enough, for the canvas of one tent flew into ribbons, and the poor chaps in it had to lie uncovered in their half-frozen sleeping-bags until morning. All through the twenty-first, twenty-second, and twenty-third the storm continued, sweeping with terrific force down the ravine, and whirling the snow in dense masses from the snow-field overhead.
To rig a tackle for a three-hundred-foot lift was another matter; but even while the derrick-car stood idle on the spur waiting for the cable equipment from the mine, a laughing boy of a surgeon from the hospital was lowered with the first of the linemen to the snow-field where the three men roped together had fallen, and surgical aid reached them before sunset.
They have such features as the Dutch painters give to their madonnas: low-country classic features, regular but round, straight but stolid; and for their depth of expressionless calm, of passionless peace, a polar snow-field could alone offer a type.
And the next moment they were sliding and tossing, apparently with the whole snow-field, down towards the gullied precipice. What happened after this, and how long it lasted, they never knew. For, hurried along with increasing momentum, but always mechanically clutching at the snow, and bounding from it as they swept on, they sometimes lost breath, and even consciousness.
Surely in the last resort I could give an account of one man, though his belt were stuffed with pistols. But how? Only, it seemed, by open force. My heart began to flutter as I planned it; and then grew steady again. A hundred paces before us a gully or ravine on the left ran up into the snow-field.
Or, again, he would take the sea and its terrors the immortal story of the 'Birkenhead; the deadly plunge of the 'Captain; the records of the lifeboats, or the fascinating story of the ships of science, exploring step by step, through miles of water, the past, the inhabitants, the hills and valleys of that underworld, that vast Atlantic bed, in which Mount Blanc might be buried without showing even his top-most snow-field above the plain of waves.
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