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Updated: May 20, 2025
The walls were literally full of exquisite pictures; no very large or rare ones, all good for every-day living; some fine old etchings, exquisite water-colors, a swarthy Campagna herds-boy with a peacock feather and a scarlet ribbon in his black hat, and for a companion-picture, the herds-boy of the mountains, fair, rosy, standing out on a opaline snow-peak, with a glistening Edelweiss in his hand; opposite these a large picture of Haag's, a camel in the desert, the Arab wife and baby in a fluttering mass of basket and fringe and shawl and scarf, on his back; the Arab father walking a few steps in advance, playing on musical pipes, his tasseled robe blowing back in the wind; on one side of this a Venice front, and on another a crag of Norway pines; here and there, small leaves of photographs from original drawings by the old masters, Leonardo, Raphael, Titian, and Luini; and everywhere, in all possible and impossible places, flowers and vines.
The Alpine climber, intent on mastering a printless snow-peak, has not to control an appetite sharpened by mountain air from sinking into the gluttony which would be fatal to the cool head and steady foot necessary for his enterprise.
Behind the camp a mass of unbroken shadow it climbed up and upward to the mystery of a sky, powdered with the gold-dust of faint stars, on which its jagged outline was printed black as ink. Beyond that again, one majestic snow-peak, like a stainless soul rising out of a tomb, gleamed in the light of an increasingly brilliant moon.
The frost began to melt, and the air was full of mist. We climbed and climbed out of the stately yellow-pine zone, up among the gnarled and blasted spruces, over and around strips of weathered stone. Once I saw a cold, white snow-peak. It was hard enough for me to carry my rifle and keep up with the hunter without talking.
But in this setting of untrodden mountains, and beside this railway which now for a few short years had been running its parlour and dining cars, its telegraphs and electric lights and hotels, a winding thread of life and civilisation, through the lonely and savage splendours of snow-peak and rock, transforming day by day the destinies of Canada the parable became a truth, proved upon the pulses of men.
"Consider our present Queen as a mother only!" he went on; "Beautiful and impassive as a snow-peak with the snow shining upon it! What of her sons? The Crown Prince is the best of them, but he has only been saved from inherited mischief by his love for Gloria. The other two boys, Rupert and Cyprian, will probably be selfish libertines!" Sir Roger opened his eyes in astonishment.
For some days we were content to enjoy looking at the blue lake Lucerne and at the piled-up masses of snow-mountains that border it all around an enticing spectacle, this last, for there is a strange and fascinating beauty and charm about a majestic snow-peak with the sun blazing upon it or the moonlight softly enriching it but finally we concluded to try a bit of excursioning around on a steamboat, and a dash on foot at the Rigi.
"This surely is Hesperides Vale," she added. The amusement went out of Tisdale's face. "Yes, madam, and your journey's end. Probably the next post-box will announce the name of your friends." She did not answer directly. She looked beyond the heads of the team to the top of the valley, where two brown slopes parted like drawn curtains and opened a blue vista of canyon closed by a lofty snow-peak.
"It is like a corpse," Arthur said as he turned away from the spectral face of the great snow-peak glimmering through the twilight. They descended cautiously among the black trees to the chalet where they were to sleep.
I traveled light, with only a single blanket rolled compactly for my shoulder strap, in case the short night should overtake me, with a generous lunch that Sandy, the cook, had supplied, but at the end of two hours' steady tramping I had sighted nothing. I had reached a wooded ravine and a snow-peak, apparently the source of the stream, closed the top of the gorge.
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