with an enormous bearskin wrapped around his head, looked like some wild animal.  The guide, seeing that we were determined to trust in the compass, finally concluded to go with us.  Our progress was necessarily very slow, as the snow was deep, our limbs chilled and stiffened by their icy covering, and a hurricane of wind blowing in our faces.  About the middle of the afternoon, however, we came suddenly out upon the very brink of a storm-swept precipice a hundred and fifty feet in depth, against the base of which the sea was hurling tremendous green breakers with a roar that drowned the rushing noise of the wind.  I had never imagined so wild and lonely a scene.  Behind and around us lay a wilderness of white, desolate peaks, crowded together under a grey, pitiless sky, with here and there a patch of trailing-pine, or a black pinnacle of trap-rock, to intensify by contrast the ghastly whiteness and desolation of the weird snowy mountains.  In front, but far below, was the troubled sea, rolling mysteriously out of a grey mist of snowflakes, breaking in thick sheets of clotted froth against the black cliff, and making long reverberations, and hollow, gurgling noises in the subterranean caverns which it had hollowed out.  Snow, water, and mountains, and in the foreground a little group of ice-covered men and shaggy horses, staring at the sea from the summit of a mighty cliff!  It was a simple picture, but it was full of cheerless, mournful suggestions.  Our guide, after looking eagerly up and down the gloomy precipitous coast in search of some familiar landmark, finally turned to me with a brighter face, and asked to see the compass.  I unscrewed the cover and showed him the blue quivering needle still pointing to the north.  He examined it curiously, but with evident respect for its mysterious powers, and at last said that it was truly a “great master,” and wanted to know if it always pointed toward the sea!  I tried to explain to him its nature and use, but I could not make him understand, and he walked away firmly believing that there was something uncanny and supernatural about a little brass box that could point out the road to the sea in a country where it had never before been!

We pushed on to the northward throughout the afternoon, keeping as near the coast as possible, winding around among the thickly scattered peaks and crossing no less than nine low ridges of the mountain range.

I noticed throughout the day the peculiar phenomenon of which I had read in Tyndall’s Glaciers of the Alps—­the blue light which seemed to fill every footprint and little crevice in the snow.  The hole made by a long slender stick was fairly luminous with what appeared to be deep blue vapour.  I never saw this singular phenomenon so marked at any other time during nearly three years of northern travel.