of heat keeps the earth alive: it is a huge power of buried
sunlight--that is what it is.

Now think: out of that cauldron, where all the bubbles would be as big
as the Alps if it could get room for its boiling, certain bubbles have
bubbled out and escaped--up and away, and there they stand in the cool,
cold sky--mountains. Think of the change, and you will no more wonder
that there should be something awful about the very look of a mountain:
from the darkness--for where the light has nothing to shine upon, much
the same as darkness--from the heat, from the endless tumult of boiling
unrest--up, with a sudden heavenward shoot, into the wind, and the
cold, and the starshine, and a cloak of snow that lies like ermine
above the blue-green mail of the glaciers; and the great sun, their
grandfather, up there in the sky; and their little old cold aunt, the
moon, that comes wandering about the house at night; and everlasting
stillness, except for the wind that turns the rocks and caverns into a
roaring organ for the young archangels that are studying how to let out
the pent-up praises of their hearts, and the molten music of the
streams, rushing ever from the bosoms of the glaciers fresh born.

Think, too, of the change in their own substance--no longer molten and
soft, heaving and glowing, but hard and shining and cold. Think of the
creatures scampering over and burrowing in it, and the birds building
their nests upon it, and the trees growing out of its sides, like hair
to clothe it, and the lovely grass in the valleys, and the gracious
flowers even at the very edge of its armour of ice, like the rich
embroidery of the garment below, and the rivers galloping down the
valleys in a tumult of white and green! And along with all these,
think of the terrible precipices down which the traveller may fall and
be lost, and the frightful gulfs of blue air cracked in the glaciers,
and the dark profound lakes, covered like little arctic oceans with
floating lumps of ice.

All this outside the mountain! But the inside, who shall tell what
lies there? Caverns of awfullest solitude, their walls miles thick,
sparkling with ores of gold or silver, copper or iron, tin or mercury,
studded perhaps with precious stones--perhaps a brook, with eyeless
fish in it, running, running ceaselessly, cold and babbling, through
banks crusted with carbuncles and golden topazes, or over a gravel of
which some of the stones arc rubies and emeralds, perh