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Updated: June 2, 2025
Presently a clear, ringing discharge of thunder is heard, followed by a rush of wind that comes sounding over the bending woods like the roar of the ocean, mingling raindrops, snow-flowers, honey-flowers, and bees in wild storm harmony. Still more impressive are the warm, reviving days of spring in the mountain pastures.
The sky that so often had been darkened with storms of cinders and ashes and lighted by the glare of volcanic fires was filled with crystal snow-flowers, which, loading the cooling mountain, gave birth to glaciers that, uniting edge to edge, at length formed one grand conical glacier a down-crawling mantle of ice upon a fountain of smouldering fire, crushing and grinding its brown, flinty lavas, and thus degrading and remodeling the entire mountain from summit to base.
In winter only the bulbs are alive, sleeping deep beneath the ground, like field mice in their nests; then the snow-flowers fall above them, lilies over lilies, until the spring winds blow, and these winter lilies wither in turn; then the hiding erythroniums and fritillarias rise again, responsive to the first touches of the sun.
Toward the end of my stay a succession of small clouds struck against the summit rocks like drifting icebergs, darkening the air as they passed, and producing a chill as definite and sudden as if ice-water had been dashed in my face. This is the kind of cloud in which snow-flowers grow, and I turned and fled.
Thunder-showers occur here during the summer months, and impressive it is to watch the coming of the big transparent drops, each a small world in itself, one unbroken ocean without islands hurling free through the air like planets through space. But still more impressive to me is the coming of the snow-flowers, falling stars, winter daisies, giving bloom to all the ground alike.
"I think not, Deliverer," answered Olfan, "for I know of no such path. I think that they have gone to bring heavy beams by means of which they will batter down the ice wall." "Still there is such a path, King," said one of the captains, "for I myself have often climbed it when I was young, searching for snow-flowers to bring to her whom I courted in those days."
After dark, when our tea was made and a rousing fire had been built, we began to make our plans. They decided to remain several days, at the least, while I concluded to make an excursion in the mean time to the untouched summit of Ritter. It was now about the middle of October, the springtime of snow-flowers.
Content with his wondrous work, the storm-king himself had fled to his far Northern home before the dawn of the Christmas day. Everything was bright and sparkling and beautiful. And most beautiful was the great hymn of praise the forest sang that Christmas morning, the pine-trees and the firs and the vines and the snow-flowers that sang of the prince and of his promised coming.
The fate of the high-flying mountain snow-flowers is a fascinating study, though little may we see of their works and ways while their storms go on.
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