purple-grey
soil. Except that, looming out of the cloud just in front of us, there
kept appearing and vanishing a long line of pilgrims, with peaked hats,
capes, and sandals, all made of straw, winding along with their staffs,
forty at least, keeping step, like figures in a frieze, like shadows on
a sheet, like spirits on the mountain of Purgatory, like anything but
solid men walking up a hill. So for hours we laboured on, the slope
becoming steeper every step, till we could go no further, and stopped at
a shelter to pass the night. Here we were lucky. The other climbers had
halted below or above, and we had the long, roomy shed to ourselves.
Blankets, a fire of wood, and a good meal restored us. We sat warming
and congratulating ourselves, when suddenly our guide at the door gave a
cry. We hurried to see. And what a sight it was! The clouds lay below us
and a starlit sky above. At our feet the mountain fell away like a
cliff, but it fell rather to a glacier than a sea--a glacier infinite as
the ocean, yawning in crevasses, billowing in ridges; a glacier not of
ice, but of vapour, changing form as one watched, opening here, closing
there, rising, falling, shifting, while far away, at the uttermost
verge, appeared a crimson crescent, then a red oval, then a yellow
globe, swimming up above the clouds, touching their lights with gold,
deepening their shadows, and spreading, where it rose, a lake of silver
fire over the surface of the tossing plain.

We looked till it was too cold to look longer, then wrapped ourselves in
quilts and went to sleep. At midnight I woke. Outside there was a
strange moaning. The wind had risen; and the sound of it in that lonely
place gave me a shock of fear. The mountain, then, was more than a heap
of dead ashes. Presences haunted it; powers indifferent to human fate.
That wind had blown before man came into being, and would blow when he
had ceased to exist. It moaned and roared. Then it was still. But I
could not sleep again, and lay watching the flicker of the lamp on the
long wooden roof, and the streaks of moonlight through the chinks, till
the coolie lit a fire and called us to get up. We started at four. The
clouds were still below, and the moon above; but she had moved across to
the west, Orion had appeared, and a new planet blazed in the east. The
last climb was very steep and our breath very scant. But we had other
things than that to think of. Through a rift in a cloud to the eastward