Again, town children cannot visualise hill and valley, forest and moor, brook and river, not to mention jungles and snowfields and the trackless ocean.

Trials were then made of the ground at the sides of the valley, but the snow was found equally deep and soft there; and after spending an hour or so in futile attempts to get forward, it became evident to all that no animal could possibly pass over the snowfield in its present condition.

The Alps are the poetry of inorganic creation, and a week or two spent on their lakes, in their valleys and gorges, amid the high waterfalls or upon their snowfields and glaciers, teaches one to associate new meanings to the words, grand,

Above the terraces great dark forests of pines and deodars, maples and horse chestnuts clung to the hill sides; and above the forests grass slopes stretched up to bare rock and the snowfields.

They were not all white; dark rocks with glittering veins edged the snowfield, and the scarred face of Force Crag ran down where the shoulder of the moor broke off four hundred feet below.

To and fro 'neath the nascent green Which clambers over its slender frame, With white peaks lighting up the scene, As snowfields glow with the sunset flame, I saunter, halting here and there For the view from my Promenade Solitaire.

Now it was a wide snowfield, except at one end, where for some unexplained reason it was open water still.

It was a bleak season to ride through the poorest and ugliest country in Europe, but there was a cloudless sky above, and a bright, cold sun, which shimmered on the huge snowfields.

Still, lean and crippled as we were, we had much to be thankful for when we thought of our poor comrades whom we had left behind, and of the snowfieldsthe horrible, horrible snowfields.

And the wind of the evening descending cool from the snowfields of some mountainous abode of distant gods came suddenly, like glad tidings to an anxious city, into the wing-like sails.

I stood at an elevation of about 7000 feet, halfway to the summit of Mont Blanc, with the whole broad expanse of glacier and snowfield glowing in the rosy twilight; and, while I watched the sun set, at my feet lay the valley of the Arve, with the town of Sallanches and its attendant villages in the blue distance of gathering night, thousands of feet below me.

The pulling this afternoon was fairly pleasant; at first over hard snow, and then on to pretty rough ice with surface snowfield cracks, bad for sledges, but ours promised to come through well.

After sundry luxuries, such as chocolate and raisins at lunch, we started off well, but soon got amongst crevasses, huge snowfields roadways running almost in our direction, and across hidden cracks into which we frequently fell.

Nunez had an eye for all beautiful things, and it seemed to him that the glow upon the snowfields and glaciers that rose about the valley on every side was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

The marks that are scored in delicate lines, such as might be ruled by a diamond on glass, have been cut by innumerable streams trickling in hot weather from the everlasting snow, or ploughed by succeeding avalanches that have slipped from the huge upper snowfields above.

He sees the little shell-like swelling at the foot of the glacier crawling down the steep slope above, and knows that it means an almost inaccessible wall of ice; and the steep snowfields that rise towards the summit are suggestive of something very different from the picture which might have existed in the mind of a German student, who once asked me whether it was possible to make the ascent on a mule.

But this theory did not explain the familiar facts of the gorgeous tints seen at sunset and sunrise, not only in the atmosphere and on the clouds near the horizon, but also in equally resplendent hues when the invisible sun shines upon Alpine peaks and snowfields.

The glaciers, snowfields, and cliffs of Mount Rolleston lie on the left.