all about them,--touched to
ethereal unreality by the light of moon and stars,--were unnumbered
crests and pinnacles, fantastically carven; black mouths of caverns,
shaggy with icicles; sudden fissures and vast continents of shadow,
like ink-stains on unsullied purity; and over-arching all, the still
wonder of the sky, pierced with points of flame.

Tired as he was, Lenox resented the need for shutting his eyes upon a
scene so stirring alike to the imagination and the heart: a scene that
lifted both, past Nature's uttermost sublime, to the Master-Builder,
whose mind is the Universe, and whose thoughts are its stars and
worlds, and the living souls of men. But for all that Nature had her
way with him; sealing up eyes and mind with the double seal of
weariness and the supreme content of the climber who knows that the
summit is at hand.

And upon the fourth day, in a blaze of sunlight, that set the uncharted
snow-fields glittering like dust of diamonds, they crossed the
Pass,--Lenox's own Pass, that no living man had set eyes or foot
upon,--and looked at last on that elusive 'other side,' that draws
certain natures like a magnet to the far-flung limits of earth.

And in this case the other side proved well worth the hardships endured
to reach it. After 30 many days cooped up between ice-walls and
precipitous heights, Lenox caught his breath at the magnitude of the
view outspread before him; an amphitheatre of 'the greater gods', ridge
beyond ridge, peak beyond dazzling peak, stabbing the blue, the highest
of them little lower than Everest's self: while across the rock-bound
valley a host of glaciers, like primeval monsters, crept downward from
the mountains that gave them birth.

As Lenox stood feasting his soul upon the splendour of it all, he knew
that this was one of the great days of his life: that only Quita's
inspiring presence was needed to crown the triumph of it. Even in the
first glow of achievement, his heart turned instinctively to hers for
sympathy and approval: and, could she have known it, her haunting fear
that the mountains would prove too strong for her had crumbled into
nothingness there and then. For if 'many waters cannot quench love,'
neither can many mountains dwarf it. When all is said, it is still
'the great amulet that makes the world a garden', and always will be,
while God's men and women have red blood in their veins.

[1] Big dinner.

[2] Great excitement.

CHAPTER XXXI