come to see how beautiful they are as well as awful, and they hated
them - and what people hate they must fear. Now that we have
learned to look at them with admiration, perhaps we do not feel
quite awe enough of them. To me they are beautiful terrors.

I will try to tell you what they are. They are portions of the
heart of the earth that have escaped from the dungeon down below,
and rushed up and out. For the heart of the earth is a great
wallowing mass, not of blood, as in the hearts of men and animals,
but of glowing hot, melted metals and stones. And as our hearts
keep us alive, so that great lump 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