Julian Home Part 20

"Come along, then; we're soon equipped," said Violet, adjusting at the looking-gla.s.s her pretty straw hat, with its drooping feather, and the blue veil tied round it.

"I say, Miss Kennedy--bother take it though, I can't always be saying Miss Kennedy--it's too long. I shall call you Eva--may I?" said Cyril.

"By all means, if you like."

"Well, then, Eva, the guide _is_ such a rum fellow; he looks like a revived mummy out of--out of Palmyra," said he, blundering a little in his geography.

"Mummy or no," said Julian, "he'll carry all our provisions and plaids to-day up to the top, which is more than most of your A Cs would do."

"A C--what does that mean?" asked Violet. "One sees it constantly in the visitors' books."

"Don't you know, Vi?" said Cyril. "It stands for athletic climber."

"Alpine Club, you little monkey," said Kennedy, throwing a fir-cone at him. "_You'll_ be qualified for the Alpine Club, Miss Home, before the day's over, I've no doubt."

"No," said Julian, "they want 13,000 feet, I believe, and the Schilthorn is only 9,000."

"Nearly three times higher than Snowdon; only fancy!" said Cyril.

Meanwhile the party had started with fair weather, and in high spirits.

The guide, with the gentlemen's plaids strapped together, led the way cheerily, occasionally talking his vile patois with Julian and Mr Kennedy, or laughing heartily at Cyril's "bad language"--for Cyril, not being strong in German, exercised a delightful ingenuity in making a very few words go a very long way. Kennedy walked generally with Eva and Violet, while Julian often joined them, and Cyril, always with some new scheme in hand, or some new fancy darting through his brain, ran chattering, from one group to another, plucking bilberries and wild strawberries in handfuls, and trying the merits of his alpenstock as a leaping-pole.

The light of morning flowed down in an ever-broadening river, and peak after peak flashed first into rose, then into crimson, and then into golden light, as the sun fell on their fields of snow; high overhead rose Alp after Alp of snow-white and luminous cloud, but the flowing curves of the hills themselves stood unveiled, with their crests cut clearly on the pale, divine, l.u.s.trous blue of heaven, and our happy band of travellers gazed untired on that glorious panorama of glistering heights from the towering cones of the Eiger and the Moench to the crowding precipices of the Ebenen-fluen and the Silberhorn. Deep below them, in the valley, "like handfuls of pearl in a goblet of emerald,"

the quiet chalets cl.u.s.tered over their pastures of vivid gra.s.s, and gave that touch of human interest which alone was wanting to complete the loveliness of the scene.

Every step brought them some new object to gaze upon with loving admiration; now the gaunt spurs of some n.o.ble pine that had thrust his gnarled roots into the crevices of rock to look down in safety on the torrent roaring far below him, and now the track of a chamois, or the bright black eyes of some little marmot peering from his burrow on the side of a sunny bank, and whistling a quick alarm to his comrades at their play.

"What an extraordinary howl," said Cyril, laughing, as the guide whooped back a sort of jodel in answer to a salute from the other side of the valley.

"It's very harmonious--is it not?" said Violet.

"Yes, that's one of the varieties of the Ranz des Vaches," said Kennedy.

"And why do they shout at each other in that way?"

"Because the mountains are lonely, Cyril, and the shepherds don't see human faces too often; so men begin to feel like brothers, and are glad to greet each other in these silent hills."

"Did you hear how the mountain echoed back his cry?" said Eva; "it sounded like a band of elves mocking at him."

"Yes, you'll hear something finer directly; the guide told me he was going to borrow an alpen-horn at one of these chalets, and then you'll discover for the first time what echo can do."

In a few minutes the guide appeared with the horn, and blew. Heavens!

what a melody of replications! How in the hollows of the hills every harsh tone died away, and all the softer notes flowed to and fro in tenderest music, and fainted in distant reverberations more and more exquisite, more and more exquisitely low. Can it be a mere echo of those rude blasts? It seemed as though some choir of spirits had caught each tone as it came from the peasant's horn, and had deified it there among the clouds, and had repeated it over and over with divinest variations, to show man how crabbed were the sounds which he produced, and yet how ravis.h.i.+ng they might one day become, when to the symphony of silver strings they rang out amid the seraph harps and choral harmonies of heaven. All the party stood still in rapturous attention, and even Cyril forgot for ten minutes his frolicsome and noisy mirth.

Reader, have you ever seen an Alpine pasture in warm July at early morning? If not, you can hardly conceive the glorious carpet over which the feet of the wanderer in Switzerland press during summer tours.

Around them as they pa.s.sed the soft mosses glowed with gold and crimson, and the edges of the lady's-mantle s.h.i.+mmered with such diamonds and pearls as never adorned a lady's mantle yet. Everywhere the gra.s.s was vivid with a many-coloured tissue of dew-dropped flowers: pale crocuses, and the bright crimson-lake carnation, and monk's-hood, and crane's-bill, and aster alpinus, and the lovely myosotis, and thousands of yellow and purple flowers, nameless or lovelier than their names, were the tapestry on which they trod; and it was interwoven through warp and woof with the blue gleam of a myriad harebells. At last they came to the cold region of those delicate nurslings of the hills, the gentianellas and gentians. Kennedy, who had been keenly on the look out, was the first of the party to find the true Alpine gentian, and instantly recognising it, ran with it to Violet and his sister.

"There," he said, "the first Alpine gentian you ever saw. Did you ever know real blue in a flower before? Doesn't it actually seem to shed a blue radiation round it?"

"How perfectly beautiful!" said Violet; "see, Eva, how intense blue and green seem to be shot into each other, or to play together like the waters of a shoaling sea."

"Shall I take a root or two?" said Kennedy.

"Not the slightest use," said Julian; "they only grow at certain elevations, and would be dead before you got down."

"Isn't it strange, Violet, that Nature should fling such a tender and exquisite gem so high up among these awful hills, where so few eyes see them?"

"Just look," said Julian, "how the moss and the gra.s.s seem to be illuminated with them, as though the heavens were golden, and stars in it were of blue."

While they talked, Cyril dashed past them with all the ardour of a young entomologist in full chase of a little mountain-ringlet, which he soon caught and pinned on the top of his straw hat. In a few minutes more he had added a great fritillery to his collection, and it gave him no trouble to pick out the finest of the superb lazy-flying Apollos, which quickly shared the same fate.

"Here's another for you, Cyril," said Eva, pointing to a gorgeous peac.o.c.k-b.u.t.terfly which had settled amicably by a bee on the pink-and-downy coronet of a great thistle.

"Oh, I don't want that; one can get it any day in England; here though, look at this lovely burnet-moth," he cried, as the blue-and-red-winged little creature settled on the same thistle-head.

"What a shame to disturb that beautiful Psyche," said Julian, as Cyril dashed his cap over the prey, and the peac.o.c.k fluttered off; "it was enjoying itself so intensely in the suns.h.i.+ne, opening and shutting its wings in unmitigated contentment." But Cyril had secured his moth without heeding the remark, and was now twenty yards ahead.

A sudden roar of sound stopped him, and he waited to ask the rest, "if they had heard the thunder?"

"It wasn't thunder, but the rush of an avalanche," said Kennedy; "there, you may see it still on the side of the Jungfrau."

"What, those little white streaks, which look like a mountain torrent?"

"Yes."

"And can those threads of snow make all that row?"

"You must remember that the threads of snow are five miles off, and are perhaps thousands of tons in weight."

By this time they had reached the part of the mountain where the climb became really toilsome, and they settled down into the steady pace, which the Swiss guides always adopt because they know that it is the quickest in the long run. And at this point Mr Kennedy and Mrs Dudley left them, preferring, like sensible old people, to stroll back in quiet, and avoid an exertion which they found too fatiguing. They knew that they could safely entrust the party to the care of Julian and the guide. The ladies often needed help, and there seemed to be something very pleasant to Kennedy in the light touch of Violet's hand, for he lent her his arm or his alpenstock oftener than was absolutely required.

They only stopped once more to quench their thirst at a streamlet which was rus.h.i.+ng impetuously down the rocks, and a little below them foamed over the precipice into a white and noisy cataract.

"I never noticed water before falling from such a height," said Julian; "it looks exactly like a succession of white comets plunging through the sky in a crowd."

"Or a throng of white-sheeted ghosts hurrying deliriously through the one too-narrow entrance of the lower world," said Kennedy. "Doesn't it remind one of Schiller's line--

"'Und es wallet und liedet und brauset und Pikcht?'"

"I admire the rainbow most, which over-arches the fall, and plays into light, or dies away as the sunbeams touch the foam," said Violet.

"Doesn't it remind you of Al-Sirat's arch, Miss Home?" asked Kennedy.

"Haven't the pleasure of that gentleman's acquaintance," observed Cyril.

"Nor I," said Kennedy; "but Al-Sirat's arch is the bridge--narrow as the edge of a razor, or the thread of an attenuated spider--which is supposed to span the fiery abyss, over which the good _skate_ into Paradise, while the bad topple over it. Don't you remember Byron's lines about it in the Giaour?

"'Yea, _Soul_, and should our prophet say That form was nought but breathing clay, By Alla! I would answer nay; Though on Al-Sirat's arch I stood, That topples o'er the fiery flood, With Paradise within my view, And all its Houris beckoning through.'

"Pretty nearly the only lines of Byron I know." Somehow Kennedy was looking at Violet while he repeated the lines.