with an enormous bearskin wrapped around his head,
looked like some wild animal. The guide, seeing
that we were determined to trust in the compass, finally
concluded to go with us. Our progress was necessarily
very slow, as the snow was deep, our limbs chilled
and stiffened by their icy covering, and a hurricane
of wind blowing in our faces. About the middle
of the afternoon, however, we came suddenly out upon
the very brink of a storm-swept precipice a hundred
and fifty feet in depth, against the base of which
the sea was hurling tremendous green breakers with
a roar that drowned the rushing noise of the wind.
I had never imagined so wild and lonely a scene.
Behind and around us lay a wilderness of white, desolate
peaks, crowded together under a grey, pitiless sky,
with here and there a patch of trailing-pine, or a
black pinnacle of trap-rock, to intensify by contrast
the ghastly whiteness and desolation of the weird snowy
mountains. In front, but far below, was the troubled
sea, rolling mysteriously out of a grey mist of snowflakes,
breaking in thick sheets of clotted froth against
the black cliff, and making long reverberations, and
hollow, gurgling noises in the subterranean caverns
which it had hollowed out. Snow, water, and mountains,
and in the foreground a little group of ice-covered
men and shaggy horses, staring at the sea from the
summit of a mighty cliff! It was a simple picture,
but it was full of cheerless, mournful suggestions.
Our guide, after looking eagerly up and down the gloomy
precipitous coast in search of some familiar landmark,
finally turned to me with a brighter face, and asked
to see the compass. I unscrewed the cover and
showed him the blue quivering needle still pointing
to the north. He examined it curiously, but with
evident respect for its mysterious powers, and at
last said that it was truly a “great master,”
and wanted to know if it always pointed toward the
sea! I tried to explain to him its nature and
use, but I could not make him understand, and he walked
away firmly believing that there was something uncanny
and supernatural about a little brass box that could
point out the road to the sea in a country where it
had never before been!
We pushed on to the northward throughout the afternoon, keeping as near the coast as possible, winding around among the thickly scattered peaks and crossing no less than nine low ridges of the mountain range.
I noticed throughout the day the peculiar phenomenon of which I had read in Tyndall’s Glaciers of the Alps—the blue light which seemed to fill every footprint and little crevice in the snow. The hole made by a long slender stick was fairly luminous with what appeared to be deep blue vapour. I never saw this singular phenomenon so marked at any other time during nearly three years of northern travel.