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At a distance the mountain seems to be harmless, the blue outline of the lofty cone terminating in a dense bank of smoke, like stormclouds gathering around the snowy peaks of the distant Apennines; but when the adventurous tourist wishes to approach nearer to its blazing crater, and toils up its torn and blackened sides, he will see in the immense chasms and rents traces of might convulsions.
They remain one of those disappointing stormclouds that give out more thunder than lightning. The proof of advancing knowledge is the improvement in compendiums and school books. There are three which must be mentioned. In the middle of the century Lavallée wrote a history of France for his students at the Military College.
But as before the lightning the serried stormclouds, heavy with preponderant excess of moisture, in swollen masses turgidly distended, compass earth and sky in one vast slumber, impending above parched field and drowsy oxen and blighted growth of shrub and verdure till in an instant a flash rives their centres and with the reverberation of the thunder the cloudburst pours its torrent, so and not otherwise was the transformation, violent and instantaneous, upon the utterance of the word.
Stormclouds enwrap the day, and rainy gloom blots out the sky; out of the clouds bursts fire fast upon fire. Driven from our course, we go wandering on the blind waves. Palinurus himself professes he cannot tell day from night on the sky, nor remember the way amid the waters. Three dubious days of blind darkness we wander on the deep, as many nights without a star.
Only two days of abiding sunshine; for the rest, mere fitful gleams across a sky heaped with stormclouds. Over Wastdale hung a black canopy; from Scawfell came mutterings of thunder; and on the last night of the week when Monica fled from her home in pelting rain tempest broke upon the mountains and the sea.
Tired out and faint with happiness, I left the lodge; at parting Zinaida pressed my hand warmly, and again smiled mysteriously. The night air was heavy and damp in my heated face; a storm seemed to be gathering; black stormclouds grew and crept across the sky, their smoky outlines visibly changing.
The years have been passing, the stormclouds have many times hidden my sun. But I have always found the sun shining above them. No matter how black and sunless today, when I have struggled on up the mountain path, I have gotten above the clouds and found the sun forever shining and God forever in His heavens. Each day as I go up the mountain I get a larger vision.
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