had to go round little pools, like lakes, enclosed between large masses of
ice; and, while thus wandering out of their path, they came near an immense
stone, which lay balanced on the edge of an icy peak. The stone lost its
balance just as they reached it, and rolled over into the abyss beneath, while
the noise of its fall was echoed back from every hollow cliff of the glaciers.
They were always going upwards. The glaciers seemed to spread above
them like a continued chain of masses of ice, piled up in wild confusion
between bare and rugged rocks. Rudy thought for a moment of what had
been told him, that he and his mother had once lain buried in one of these
cold, heart-chilling fissures; but he soon banished such thoughts, and looked
upon the story as fabulous, like many other stories which had been told him.
Once or twice, when the men thought the way was rather difficult for such a
little boy, they held out their hands to assist him; but he would not accept
their assistance, for he stood on the slippery ice as firmly as if he had been a
chamois. They came at length to rocky ground; sometimes stepping upon
moss-covered stones, sometimes passing beneath stunted fir-trees, and
again through green meadows. The landscape was always changing, but
ever above them towered the lofty snow-clad mountains, whose names not
only Rudy but every other child knew-”The Jungfrau,” “The Monk and the
Eiger.”
Rudy had never been so far away before; he had never trodden on the
wide-spreading ocean of snow that lay here with its immovable billows,
from which the wind blows off the snowflake now and then, as it cuts the
foam from the waves of the sea. The glaciers stand here so close together it
might almost be said they are hand-in-hand; and each is a crystal palace for
the Ice Maiden, whose power and will it is to seize and imprison the unwary
traveller.
The sun shone warmly, and the snow sparkled as if covered with
glittering diamonds. Numerous insects, especially butterflies and bees, lay
dead in heaps on the snow. They had ventured too high, or the wind had
carried them here and left them to die of cold.
