Indeed, my fasting,
and the rare thin air of the height, the chill and the dampness that
had soaked my thin clothes through and through, quite lowered my blood
and left it piano, whimpering and irresolute. I shivered and demanded
the sun.
Then I bethought me of the hunk of bread I had stolen, and pulling it
out of my haversack I began to munch that ungrateful breakfast. It was
hard and stale, and gave me little sustenance; I still gazed upwards
into the uniform meaningless light fog, looking for the ridge.
Suddenly, with no warning to prepare the mind, a faint but distinct
wind blew upon me, the mist rose in a wreath backward and upward, and
I was looking through clear immensity, not at any ridge, but over an
awful gulf at great white fields of death. The Alps were right upon me
and before me, overwhelming and commanding empty downward distances of
air. Between them and me was a narrow dreadful space of nothingness
and silence, and a sheer mile below us both, a floor to that
prodigious hollow, lay the little lake.
My stone had not been a halting-place at all, but was itself the
summit of the ridge, and those two rocks on either side of it framed a
notch upon the very edge and skyline of the high hills of Brienz.
Surprise and wonder had not time to form in my spirit before both were
swallowed up by fear. The proximity of that immense wall of cold, the
Alps, seen thus full from the level of its middle height and
comprehended as it cannot be from the depths; its suggestion of
something never changing throughout eternity - yet dead - was a threat
to the eager mind. They, the vast Alps, all wrapped round in ice,
frozen, and their immobility enhanced by the delicate, roaming veils
which (as from an attraction) hovered in their hollows, seemed to halt
the process of living. And the living soul whom they thus perturbed
was supported by no companionship. There were no trees or blades of
grass around me, only the uneven and primal stones of that height.
There were no birds in the gulf; there was no sound. And the whiteness
of the glaciers, the blackness of the snow-streaked rocks beyond, was
glistening and unsoftened. There had come something evil into their
sublimity. I was afraid.
Nor could I bear to look downwards. The slope was in no way a danger.
A man could walk up it without often using his hands, and a man could
go down it slowly without any direct fall, though here and there he
would have to turn round at each dip or step and hold with his hands
and feel a little for his foothold.
