vellers were yet climbing the
mountain. As the heat of the glowing day when they had stopped to drink
at the streams of melted ice and snow, was changed to the searching cold
of the frosty rarefied night air at a great height, so the fresh beauty
of the lower journey had yielded to barrenness and desolation. A craggy
track, up which the mules in single file scrambled and turned from
block to block, as though they were ascending the broken staircase of
a gigantic ruin, was their way now. No trees were to be seen, nor any
vegetable growth save a poor brown scrubby moss, freezing in the chinks
of rock. Blackened skeleton arms of wood by the wayside pointed upward
to the convent as if the ghosts of former travellers overwhelmed by the
snow haunted the scene of their distress. Icicle-hung caves and cellars
built for refuges from sudden storms, were like so many whispers of the
perils of the place; never-resting wreaths and mazes of mist wandered
about, hunted by a moaning wind; and snow, the besetting danger of the
mountain, against which all its defences were taken, drifted sharply
down.

The file of mules, jaded by their day's work, turned and wound slowly
up the deep ascent; the foremost led by a guide on foot, in his
broad-brimmed hat and round jacket, carrying a mountain staff or two
upon his shoulder, with whom another guide conversed. There was no
speaking among the string of riders. The sharp cold, the fatigue of the
journey, and a new sensation of a catching in the breath, partly as if
they had just emerged from very clear crisp water, and partly as if they
had been sobbing, kept them silent.

At length, a light on the summit of the rocky staircase gleamed through
the snow and mist. The guides called to the mules, the mules pricked up
their drooping heads, the travellers' tongues were loosened, and in a
sudden burst of slipping, climbing, jingling, clinking, and talking,
they arrived at the convent door.

Other mules had arrived not long before, some with peasant riders and
some with goods, and had trodden the snow about the door into a pool
of mud. Riding-saddles and bridles, pack-saddles and strings of bells,
mules and men, lanterns, torches, sacks, provender, barrels, cheeses,
kegs of honey and butter, straw bundles and packages of many shapes,
were crowded confusedly together in this thawed quagmire and about the
steps. Up here in the clouds, everything was seen through cloud, and
seemed dissolving into cloud