an edge of steel, poured slantwise on us from the north. As we rose,
the stars to west seemed far beneath us, and the Great Bear sprawled
upon the ridges of the lower hills outspread. We kept slowly moving
onward, upward, into what seemed like a thin impalpable mist, but
was immeasurable tracts of snow. The last cembras were left behind,
immovable upon dark granite boulders on our right. We entered a
formless and unbillowed sea of greyness, from which there rose dim
mountain-flanks that lost themselves in air. Up, ever up, and
still below us westward sank the stars. We were now 7500 feet above
sea-level, and the December night was rigid with intensity of frost.
The cold, and movement, and solemnity of space, drowsed every sense.

IV

The memory of things seen and done in moonlight is like the memory of
dreams. It is as a dream that I recall the night of our tobogganing to
Klosters, though it was full enough of active energy. The moon was in
her second quarter, slightly filmed with very high thin clouds, that
disappeared as night advanced, leaving the sky and stars in all their
lustre. A sharp frost, sinking to three degrees above zero Fahrenheit,
with a fine pure wind, such wind as here they call 'the mountain
breath.' We drove to Wolfgang in a two-horse sledge, four of us
inside, and our two Christians on the box. Up there, where the Alps of
Death descend to join the Lakehorn Alps, above the Wolfswalk, there
is a world of whiteness--frozen ridges, engraved like cameos of aërial
onyx upon the dark, star-tremulous sky; sculptured buttresses of snow,
enclosing hollows filled with diaphanous shadow, and sweeping aloft
into the upland fields of pure clear drift. Then came the swift
descent, the plunge into the pines, moon-silvered on their frosted
tops. The battalions of spruce that climb those hills defined the