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And away they went, with the sea-scud and the snow-flakes flying about their ears, while the waxing rollers rose big as houses. The parson of Brönö had never been out in such weather before. They sailed right into the rollers, and they sailed out again. Soon it became black night. The sea shone like mountain snow-fields, and the showers of snow and spray rather waxed than waned.
Like the blue and the Arctic foxes, a strange instinct to store things seems to stir dimly at times within them. Occasionally, instead of eating and sleeping after a kill, the cubs, led by the mother wolf, would hunt half of the day and night and carry all they caught to the snow-fields.
It was no longer the place of palaces and pleasure-houses, of flowery gardens and leafy woods that I had seen it, but above it still gleamed the white snow-fields and shining peaks of Charchani and Pichu-Pichu, and between the two great white ranges still towered the vast, black, snow-crowned cone of Misti, the smoke-mountain, rising sheer in its lonely grandeur twelve thousand feet above the sloping plain on which the city lay.
One moonlit night the old wolf took her cubs to the edge of one of these snow-fields, where the eager eyes soon noticed dark streaks shooting hither and yon over the bare white surface. At first they chased them wildly; but one might as well try to catch a moonbeam, which has not so many places to hide as a wood-mouse.
They seemed actually suspended from the dark vault of heaven, and their gentle light shed a fairylike gleam over the snow-fields around the foot of the Matterhorn, which raised its stupendous pinnacle on high, penetrating to the heart of the Great Bear, and crowning itself with a diadem of his magnificent stars.
It appears, however, from recent observations on the snow-fields of the Arctic regions, that some little meteoric dust of extra mundane origin is continually falling. The dark colour of ordinary mould is obviously due to the presence of decaying organic matter, which, however, is present in but small quantities.
She set out homewards in the month of June, carrying her infant in her arms, and, accompanied by two chamois hunters, crossed the Gemmi on her way to Grindelwald. They had already left more than half the journey behind them. They had crossed high ridges, and traversed snow-fields; they could even see her native valley, with its familiar wooden cottages. They had only one more glacier to climb.
Mount Burney, a noble, snow-covered mountain, corresponding to Mount Sarmiento in grandeur of outline, was in full view, but was partially veiled in mist. On the following day, however, the weather was perfect for the sail past Sarmiento Range and Snowy Glacier, which were in sight all day. Blue could not be more deep and pure, nor white more spotless, than their ice and snow-fields.
One by one the stars came out and gradually twinkled into brilliancy, until at last the glorious host of heaven shone in the deepening sky with an intensity of lustre that cannot be described, contrasting strangely with the pallid ghostly aspect of the surrounding snow-fields.
I hope that they do not find you oppressed with weakness or suffering; and if they do not, I am sure that your spirit is alert and happy, and that the bright snow-fields and the lovely meteor of beauty that hangs in the air in such a morning as this was, are as charming to you as they ever were.
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