g
very hungry, it occurred to Otter that he might find edible roots among
this scanty vegetation.

With this hope he began to climb the slope, to be rewarded in due course
by the discovery of a vegetable that he recognised, for it was the same
which had been offered to him on the occasion of his unlucky outbreak
that had resulted in the casting away of the rubies.

With this poor food the dwarf filled himself, and having found a bough
that made him an excellent staff, he continued his climb, desiring to
see what there might be on the other side of the neck.

Arriving there without any great difficulty, Otter stood astonished,
although he was not much given to the study of scenery. Below him lay
the City of the Mist, with its shining belt of rivers that, fed from the
inexhaustible mountain snows, meandered across the vast plains--now no
longer hidden in mist--which they had trodden on their journey. Above
his head the mighty peak towered thousands of feet into the air, till it
ended in a summit shaped like a human finger pointing eternally to the
heavens. Before him the scene was even stranger, made up as it was of
snowy fields broken by ridges of black rock, and laid one beneath the
other like white sails drying upon the slopes of a sandhill.

Gradually, as the eye travelled downward, these snow-fields grew fewer
and fewer, till at last they vanished altogether, and their place was
taken, first by stretches of grass-land, and finally, at the foot of
the mountain, by what seemed to be a rich and level country interspersed
with clumps of bush and forest trees.

The first of these patches of snow lay within five furlongs of where the
dwarf stood, but several hundred feet below him.

Between the neck of the pass and this snow stretched a mighty rift or
chasm, with sides so sheer that no goat could have kept a footing on
them. Yet this gulf was not without its bridge, for a rock wall rose
from the bottom of the chasm, forming the bed of a glacier which spanned
it from side to side. In some places the wall was comparatively level
and in others it showed descents sharp as those of a waterfall. This
remarkable bridge of ice--that varied from a hundred paces to a
few yards in width--was bordered on either side by the most fearful
precipices; while, just where its fall was sheerest and its width
narrowest, it seemed to spring across a space of nothingness, like the
arch of a bridge thrown from bank to bank of a river. Indee