up higher still, and gets up to the top of one of the peaks, one
sees that Switzerland is really a region of barren ridges, millions
of acres of cold stones and ice, with a few little green cracks
among the mountain bases, where men have crept to live; and that
man is only tolerated there.

One day I was out with a guide on a peak at sunrise. Behind the
bleak and shadowy ridges there stole a flush of awakening dawn;
then came a line of the purest yellow light, touching the crags and
snowfields with sharp blue shadows; the lemon-coloured radiance
passed into fiery gold, the gold flushed to crimson, and then the
sun leapt into sight, and shed the light of day upon the troubled
sea of mountains. It was more than that--the hills made, as it
were, the rim of a great cold shadowy goblet; and the light was
poured into it from the uprushing sun, as bubbling and sparkling
wine is poured into a beaker. I found myself thrilled from head to
foot with an intense and mysterious rapture. What did it all mean,
this awful and resplendent solemnity, full to brim of a solitary
and unapproachable holiness? What was the secret of the thing?
Perhaps every one of those stars that we had seen fade out of the
night was ringed round by planets such as ours, peopled by forms
undreamed of; doubtless on millions of globes, the daylight of some
central sun was coming in glory over the cold ridges, and waking
into life sentient beings, in lands outside our ken, each with
civilisations and histories and hopes and fears of their own. A
stupendous, an overwhelming thought! And yet, in the midst of it,
here was I myself, a little consciousness sharply divided from it
all, permitted to be a spectator, a partaker of the intolerable and
gigantic mystery, and yet so strangely made that the whole of that
vast and prodigious complexity of life and law counted for less to