the sensuous music of the crashing ice-domes and the boom and
thunder of the passing avalanche--music very familiar to his ear, for
he had heard it every afternoon at this hour since the day he first came
courting this child of the earth, who lives in the sky, and that day
is far, yes--for he was at this pleasant sport before the Middle Ages
drifted by him in the valley; before the Romans marched past, and
before the antique and recordless barbarians fished and hunted here and
wondered who he might be, and were probably afraid of him; and before
primeval man himself, just emerged from his four-footed estate, stepped
out upon this plain, first sample of his race, a thousand centuries ago,
and cast a glad eye up there, judging he had found a brother human being
and consequently something to kill; and before the big saurians wallowed
here, still some eons earlier. Oh yes, a day so far back that the
eternal son was present to see that first visit; a day so far back that
neither tradition nor history was born yet and a whole weary eternity
must come and go before the restless little creature, of whose face this
stupendous Shadow Face was the prophecy, would arrive in the earth and
begin his shabby career and think of a big thing. Oh, indeed yes;
when you talk about your poor Roman and Egyptian day-before-yesterday
antiquities, you should choose a time when the hoary Shadow Face of the
Jungfrau is not by. It antedates all antiquities known or imaginable;
for it was here the world itself created the theater of future
antiquities. And it is the only witness with a human face that was there
to see the marvel, and remains to us a memorial of it.

By 4:40 P.M. the nose of the shadow is perfect and is beautiful. It is
black and is powerfully marked against the upright canvas of glowing
snow, and covers hundreds of acres of that resplendent surface.

Meantime shadow No. 2 has been creeping out well to the rear of the face
west of it--and at five o'clock has assumed a shape that has rather a
poor and rude semblance of a shoe.

Meantime, also, the great Shadow Face has been gradually changing for
twenty minutes, and now, 5 P.M., it is becoming a quite fair portrait of
Roscoe Conkling. The likeness is there, and is unmistakable. The goatee
is shortened, now, and has an end; formerly it hadn't any, but ran off
eastward and arrived nowhere.

By 6 P.M. the face has dissolved and gone, and the goatee has become
what looks like the shad