letely covered with fragments of grey rock that Jane could
hardly he persuaded that it really was an ice slope that we were
scrambling up with such difficulty, until a peep into a cold mysterious
cleft convinced her that she was really and truly standing upon 200 feet
of solid ice.

The sight that now burst upon us was one to be remembered. Kolahoi towered
ethereal--a sunlit wedge of sheer rock some six thousand feet above
us--into the crystal air. From his feet the white frozen billows of the
great glacier rolled, a glistering sea, to where we, atoms in the enormous
loneliness, stood breathless in admiration. Around the head of the wide
amphitheatre wherein we stood rose a circle of stately peaks, their bases
flanged with rocky buttresses, dark amid the long sweeps of radiant snow,
their shattered peaks reared high into the very heavens. A great silence
reigned. There was no wind with us, and yet, even as we watched, a white
cloud flitted past the virgin peak of Kolahoi--ghostly, intangible; and
immediately, even as vultures assemble suddenly, no one knows whence, so
did the clouds appear, surging over the gleaming shoulders of the mountain
ridges, and up and round the grim precipices. We turned and hurried down
the face of the glacier, and made for camp, as we knew from much
experience that a thunderstorm was inevitable.

Over the beds of dirty snow, down by the side of the new-born torrent,
which leaped full-grown to life from the womb of a green cavern below the
glacier; over patches of pulpy turf just freed from its wintry bondage,
and already carpeted with masses of rose-coloured primulas, we hastened,
keeping to the left bank of the stream, in order to avoid the torrent
which had so troubled us in the morning, which we knew would be deeper in
the afternoon owing to the melting of the snows in the sunshine.

We had got but a bare half of our journey done when the storm burst, and
in a very short time we were reduced to the recklessness which comes of
being as wet as you can possibly be.

"The thunder bellows far from snow to snow
(Home, Rose and Home, Provence and La Palie),
And loud and louder roars the flood below.
Heigho! But soon in shelter we shall be
(Home, Rose and Home, Provence and La Palie)."

Crossing the river on a big snow-bridge below the point where our old
enemy came thundering down the mountain-side, we tramped gaily through mud
and mire and over slippery rocks until we were gla