day the secret which I was convinced lay entombed in this sepulchre. So
again I pressed onward,--this time more slowly,--having to pick my way
among the bits of jagged granite filling up terraces sliced out of the
mountain, around enormous rocks projecting across my path,--overhanging
precipices that sheered straight down into dark abysses, (I must have
verged round to a different side from that I came up on,)--creeping
through narrow passages formed by the junction of two immense boulders.
Tearing my hands with the sharp corners of the rocks, I climbed in vain
hope of at last seeing the summit. Still rocks piled on rocks faced my
wearied eyes, vainly striving to pierce through some chink or cranny
into the space behind them. Still rocks, rocks, rocks, against whose
adamantine sides my feeble will dashed restlessly and impotently. My
eyeballs almost burst, as it seemed, in the intense effort to strain
through those stone prison-walls. And by one of those curious links of
association by which two distant scenes are united as one, I seemed
again to be sitting in my garret, striving to pierce the darkness for
an answer to the question then raised, and at the same moment passed
over me, like the sweep of angels' wings, the consciousness of that
Presence which had there infolded me. And with that consciousness, the
eager, irritated waves of excitement died away, and there was a calm,
in which I no longer beat like a caged beast against the never-ending
rocks, but, borne irresistibly along in the strong current of a mighty,
still emotion, pressed on with a certainty that left no room for
excitement, because none for doubt. And so I came upon it. Swinging
round one more rock, hanging over a breathless precipice, and landing
upon the summit of the mountain, I beheld it stretched at my feet: a
lake about five miles in circumference, bedded like an eye in the
naked, bony rock surrounding it, with quiet rippling waters placidly
smiling in the level rays of the afternoon sun,--the Unfathomable
Secret, the Mystery of Ages, the long sought for, the Source of the