Rivers of Ice. Robert Michael Ballantyne

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СКАЧАТЬ and all agreed—yes, they did agree on this point—that the thing in blue tights and buttons beside the driver was the most impudent-looking monkey the world had ever produced!

      The natives of the place also had their opinions, and expressed them to each other; especially the bronzed, stalwart sedate-looking men who hung about in knots near the centre of the village, and seemed to estimate the probability of the stout young Englishmen on horseback being likely to require their services often—for these, said the driver, were the celebrated guides of Chamouni; men of bone and muscle, and endurance and courage; the leaders of those daring spirits who consider—and justly so—the ascent to the summit of Mont Blanc, or Monte Rosa, or the Matterhorn, a feat; the men who perform this feat it may be, two or three times a week—as often as you choose to call them to it, in fact—and think nothing of it; the men whose profession it is to risk their lives every summer from day to day for a few francs; who have become so inured to danger that they have grown quite familiar with it, insomuch that some of the reckless blades among them treat it now and then with contempt, and pay the penalty of such conduct with their lives.

      Sinking into a couch in her private sitting-room, Mrs Stoutley resigned herself to Susan’s care, and, while she was having her boots taken off, said with a sigh:—

      “Well, here we are at last. What do you think of Chamouni, Susan?”

      “Rather a wet place, ma’am; ain’t it?”

      With a languid smile, Mrs Stoutley admitted that it was, but added, by way of encouragement that it was not always so. To which Susan replied that she was glad to hear it, so she was, as nothink depressed her spirits so much as wet and clouds, and gloom.

      Susan was a pretty girl of sixteen, tall, as well as very sedate and womanly, for her age. Having been born in one of the midland counties, of poor, though remarkably honest, parents, who had received no education themselves, and therefore held it to be quite unnecessary to bestow anything so useless on their daughter, she was, until very recently, as ignorant of all beyond the circle of her father’s homestead as the daughter of the man in the moon—supposing no compulsory education-act to be in operation in the orb of night. Having passed through them, she now knew of the existence of France and Switzerland, but she was quite in the dark as to the position of these two countries with respect to the rest of the world, and would probably have regarded them as one and the same if their boundary-line had not been somewhat deeply impressed upon her by the ungallant manner in which the Customs officials examined the contents of her modest little portmanteau in search, as Gillie gave her to understand, of tobacco.

      Mrs Stoutley had particularly small feet, a circumstance which might have induced her, more than other ladies, to wear easy boots; but owing to some unaccountable perversity of mental constitution, she deemed this a good reason for having her boots made unusually tight. The removal of these, therefore, afforded great relief, and the administration of a cup of tea produced a cheering reaction of spirits, under the influence of which she partially forgot herself, and resolved to devote a few minutes to the instruction of her interestingly ignorant maid.

      “Yes,” she said, arranging herself comfortably, and sipping her tea, while Susan busied herself putting away her lady’s “things,” and otherwise tidying the room, “it does not always rain here; there is a little sunshine sometimes. By the way, where is Miss Gray?”

      “In the bedroom, ma’am, unpacking the trunks.”

      “Ah, well, as I was saying, they have a little sunshine sometimes, for you know, Susan, people must live, and grass or grain cannot grow without sunshine, so it has been arranged that there should be enough here for these purposes, but no more than enough, because Switzerland has to maintain its character as one of the great refrigerators of Europe.”

      “One of the what, ma’am?”

      “Refrigerators,” explained Mrs Stoutley; “a refrigerator, Susan, is a freezer; and it is the special mission of Switzerland to freeze nearly all the water that falls on its mountains, and retain it there in the form of ice and snow until it is wanted for the use of man. Isn’t that a grand idea?”

      The lecturer’s explanation had conveyed to Susan’s mind the idea of the Switzers going with long strings of carts to the top of Mont Blanc for supplies of ice to meet the European demand, and she admitted that it was a grand idea, and asked if the ice and snow lasted long into the summer.

      “Long into it!” exclaimed her teacher. “Why, you foolish thing, its lasts all through it.”

      “Oh indeed, ma’am!” said Susan, who entertained strong doubts in her heart as to the correctness of Mrs Stoutley’s information on this point.

      “Yes,” continued that lady, with more animation than she had experienced for many months past, so invigorating was the change of moral atmosphere induced by this little breeze of instruction; “yes, the ice and snow cover the hills and higher valleys for dozens and dozens of miles round here in all directions, not a few inches deep, such as we sometimes see in England, but with thousands and millions of tons of it, so that the ice in the valleys is hundreds of feet thick, and never melts away altogether, but remains there from year to year—has been there, I suppose, since the world began, and will continue, I fancy, until the world comes to an end.”

      Mrs Stoutley warmed up here, to such an extent that she absolutely flushed, and Susan, who had heretofore regarded her mistress merely as a weakish woman, now set her down, mentally, as a barefaced story-teller.

      “Surely, ma’am,” she said, with diffidence, “ice and snow like that doesn’t fill all the valleys, else we should see it, and find it difficult to travel through ’em; shouldn’t we, ma’am?”

      “Silly girl!” exclaimed her preceptress, “I did not say it filled all the valleys, but the higher valleys—valleys such as, in England and Scotland, would be clothed with pasturage and waving grain, and dotted with cattle and sheep and smiling cottages.”

      Mrs Stoutley had by this time risen to a heroic frame, and spoke poetically, which accounts for her ascribing risible powers to cottages.

      “And thus you see, Susan,” she continued, “Switzerland is, as it were, a great ice-tank, or a series of ice-tanks, in which the ice of ages is accumulated and saved up, so that the melting of a little of it—the mere dribbling of it, so to speak—is sufficient to cause the continuous flow of innumerable streams and of great rivers, such as the Rhone, and the Rhine, and the Var.”

      The lecture received unexpected and appropriate illustration here by the sudden lifting of the mists, which had hitherto blotted out the landscape.

      “Oh, aunt!” exclaimed Emma, running in at the moment, “just look at the hills. How exquisite! How much grander than if we had seen them quite clear from the first!”

      Emma was strictly correct, for it is well known that the grandeur of Alpine scenery is greatly enhanced by the wild and weird movements of the gauze-like drapery with which it is almost always partially enshrouded.

      As the trio stood gazing in silent wonder and admiration from their window, which, they had been informed, commanded a view of the summit of Mont Blanc, the mist had risen like a curtain partially rolled up. All above the curtain-foot presented the dismal grey, to which they had been too long accustomed, but below, and, as it were, far behind this curtain, the mountain-world was seen rising upwards.

      So close were they to the foot of the Great White Monarch, that it seemed to tower like a giant-wall before them; but this wall was varied and beautiful as well as grand. Already the curtain had risen high enough to disclose hoary cliffs and precipices, with steep grassy slopes between, СКАЧАТЬ