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The little black knobs that rise above the edge
represent for him huge impassable rocks, sinking on one side in scarped
slippery surfaces towards the snow-field, and on the other stooping in
one tremendous cliff to a distorted glacier thousands of feet below. The
faint blue line across the upper neve, scarcely distinguishable to the
eye, represents to one observer nothing but a trifling undulation; a
second, perhaps, knows that it means a crevasse; the mountaineer
remembers that it is the top of a huge chasm, thirty feet across, and
perhaps ten times as deep, with perpendicular sides of glimmering blue
ice, and fringed by thick rows of enormous pendent icicles. The marks
that are scored in delicate lines, such as might be ruled by a diamond
on glass, have been cut by innumerable streams trickling in hot weather
from the everlasting snow, or ploughed by succeeding avalanches that
have slipped from the huge upper snowfields above. In short, there is no
insignificant line or mark that has not its memory or its indication of
the strange phenomena of the upper world.


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