I found myself lured to the highest cliff, whence I could look out, through the trees, on the far, smooth disk of the lake.  Smooth and fair as the AEgean it lay before me, and the trees were silent as olives at noonday on the shores of Cos.  But how different in color, in sentiment!  Here, perfect sunshine can never dust the water with the purple bloom of the South, can never mellow its hard, cold tint of greenish-blue.  The distant hills, whether dark or light, are equally cold, and are seen too nakedly through the crystal air to admit of any illusion.  Bracing as is this atmosphere, the gods could never breathe it.  It would revenge on the ivory limbs of Apollo his treatment of Marsyas.  No foam-born Aphrodite could rise warm from yonder wave; not even the cold, sleek Nereids could breast its keen edge.  We could only imagine it disturbed, temporarily, by the bath-plunge of hardy Vikings, whom we can see, red and tingling from head to heel, as they emerge.

“Come!” cried P., “the steamer is about to leave!”

We all wandered down the steps, I with my lilies in my hand.  Even the rough peasants seemed reluctant to leave the spot, and not wholly for the sake of Alexander Svirski.  We were all safely embarked and carried back to Valaam, leaving the island to its solitude.  Alexis (as I shall call our Russian friend) put us in charge of a native artist who knew every hidden beauty of Valaam, and suggested an exploration of the inlet, while he went back to his devotions.  We borrowed a boat from the monks, and impressed a hardy fisherman into our service.  I supposed we had already seen the extent of the inlet, but on reaching its head a narrow side-channel disclosed itself, passing away under a quaint bridge and opening upon an inner lake of astonishing beauty.  The rocks were disposed in every variety of grouping,—­sometimes rising in even terraces, step above step, sometimes thrusting out a sheer wall from the summit, or lying slant-wise in masses split off by the wedges of the ice.  The fairy birches, in their thin foliage, stood on the edge of the water like Dryads undressing for a bath, while the shaggy male firs elbowed each other on the heights for a look at them.  Other channels opened in the distance, with glimpses of other and as beautiful harbors in the heart of the islands.  “You may sail for seventy-five versts,” said the painter, “without seeing them all.”

The fearlessness of all wild creatures showed that the rules of the good monks had been carefully obeyed.  The wild ducks swam around our boat, or brooded, in conscious security, on their nests along the shore.  Three great herons, fishing in a shallow, rose slowly into the air and flew across the water, breaking the silence with their hoarse trumpet-note.  Farther in the woods there are herds of wild reindeer, which are said to have become gradually tame.  This familiarity of the animals took away from the islands all that was repellent in their solitude.  It half restored the broken link between man and the subject-forms of life.