Page:Life in the Old World - Vol. I.djvu/99

comparison between it and the fleetingness of our physical being. But at the same moment the soul elevates itself, as if to place a higher nobility beside this majesty of the life of nature. It is with such feelings that you reach Ober-Hasli, and wandering on the edge of gloomy precipices, along broken, and, as it were, riven paths, continually ascending, continually astonished by the grand scene, you leave behind you the region of fruit trees, and passing through pine woods and yellow gentians, enter the region of the Alpine rose, the savine, the small aromatic flowers that grow on the pasturages, and so reach the steep slopes of the mountains, where a slippery and dangerous sward seems to mark the limits of grazing for the cattle, and of human curiosity. For, higher up, immense masses of snow crush down the life of nature, and the ice of many thousand years clothes the Jungfrau, Finsterhorn, Wetterhorn and Shoukhorn, the lonely pyramids of this Alpine chain. The clear waters of the Aar rush forth from beneath a vault of ice. To a great distance, as far as the eye can penetrate, all is ice; immense crystals glitter in the depths; seldom is a chamois seen to speed through the icy desert; seldom a lammer-geir circles over these crags; man has made a few tracks, but for the extent of many, many miles, not a foot-trace can be discerned. The wanderer is easily swallowed up in the crevices of the ice, and when this happens, he is sometimes found, after several ages, carried away by the perpetually advancing glacier, immovable in the midst of its accumulated ice. Thus the earth lies buried under La Gemmi. La Gemmi rears itself, naked