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Updated: May 1, 2025
Along the intermediate space between the cliff's crest and the snow-line is a belt of woodland, intersected by what might be taken for streams of water, were it not for their colour. But they are too blue, too noiseless, to be water.
The chief objection urged was the fact that the snow-line must in these districts be something like 30,000 feet above the sea-level. It appeared, therefore, impossible to believe the assertion of all the explorers, that the Himalayas were covered with forests of gigantic pines. Finally, however, actual personal observation upset theory.
And here was his guide grown old; and his friend, the comrade of so many climbs, so many bivouacs above the snow-line, had failed to keep his tryst. "Perhaps there will be a letter from him at Couttet's," said Chayne, and the two men walked through the streets to the hotel. There was no letter, but on the other hand there was a telegram. Chayne tore it open.
Above them, still enormously above them, earth towered away towards the snow-line, where from east to west across hundreds of miles, ruled as with a ruler, the last of the bold birches stopped. Above that, in scarps and blocks upheaved, the rocks strove to fight their heads above the white smother.
If in the course of his ascent he had kept his eyes pretty steadily fixed upon the magnificent summits far off white with snows, but nearer blue with the ice which has led the Tartars to give to them the name of Ialbus or ice-mane; if lower down he had gazed with admiration at the oaks which for two centuries had grasped with their roots and overspread with their branches the rocks in situations to which upon the Alps and the Pyrenees only climbs the pine; and if higher up he had not passed by unnoticed even the lowly pink and rose of the mountains, blooming along the snow-line, but even there sought out by the bee and the butterfly of Apollo; how would he be overwhelmed with the sublimity of the scene on finding himself in the dread company of Kasbek and the hundred other peaks which are his vassals!
The Peak of Teneriffe, Mount Etna, and several others, also rise above the snow-line; while the burning mountains of Iceland, Greenland, and Kamtschatka, with those which rear their heads in the frozen regions near the South Pole, are for the most part enveloped in ice and snow from head to foot.
My leisure hours were spent in study, working in the abbé's laboratory, and with Angela, who nearly always accompanied me on my excursions to the head of the aqueduct which, as I have already mentioned was at the foot of the snow-line, two days' journey from the valley lake.
He did not fear a robbery with force and arms, although he was satisfied that there was more than one concerned in it, but this he attributed only to the encumbering weight of their expected booty. He simply waited for the dawn. It was some time before his eyes were greeted with the vague opaline brightness of the firmament which meant the vanishing of the pallid snow-line before the coming day.
There were even indications that he admired it; indications dimmed, it is true, by the distance that lay between the lofty boss-pilotical altitude and my lowly one, yet perceptible to me; perceptible, and translatable into a compliment compliment coming down from about the snow-line and not well thawed in the transit, and not likely to set anything afire, not even a cub-pilot's self-conceit; still a detectable complement, and precious.
Thus the first hours of the island night would pass, till a glare of light flashed upon the blackness of the sea beyond the snow-line of surf, as the canoes from Matakatea would round the point, each one with a flaming torch of dried palm-leaves held high by a brown, tattooed hand, to dazzle the flying fish that, with wings outspread, floated motionless upon the surface of the water.
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