So there was nothing for it but to climb the mountains. Italy, after all, lay on the other side.

We were lucky that it was not snowing. The brilliant moonlight showed us every crag, every rocky cliff, every precipice, every glinting carapace of ice. I do not know what a carapace is, but I am sure there were some on the mountain. At first the exhilaration of climbing, even in our weariness, kept us going. The unearthly beauty of the scene—like some Vision from the works of Byron or Shelley—filled our hearts with strange longings. It was easy to believe, in that dreamlike setting, in the Spirits and Phantoms of folklore. We climbed and climbed, until all feeling had been lost from our feet and hands, and until every breath was a sharp pain in our lungs, but we dared not stop. We climbed until the moon set behind the glittering jagged edge of the mountainside, and then we went on climbing in the horrid chill that fell with the darkness—a deeper chill than ever before. But the sky was lightening. Some of the stars in the region to our left were beginning to fade, as the light soaked up the dark blue they rested on—they faded as pearls are supposed to fade if they are not worn. (Although I have never possessed any pearls, my dear mother had a fine necklace of them, which was with her when the ship sank; so that they returned to their element as she left hers, forever! I think there is something malign about jewelry, and I will not wear it for that reason. No! Not even the simplest gold ring. I have made a Vow.)

And presently, with a grandeur that none who have not seen it can possibly imagine, the sun rose over the Alps.

We were, at that point, on a kind of small plateau in the ice. To our right, a great sheet of snow sparkled and gleamed, leading up to a vast cliff of dark rock. Ahead of us, in tumbled profusion, jagged lumps of ice, some as small as Charlotte’s Herr Woodenkopf and some as big as a cottage, lay scattered over the surface of the glacier. To our left, the sun, unbearably bright, rose like a stately balloon with a cargo of the original fire of the gods, over a ridge of sharp-edged snow. There were no shadows in this icy world, because instead of hiding the light or keeping it out, the ice magnified it and split it up in the way Sir Isaac Newton did in his famous experiment, which Miss Davenport demonstrated to us one bright morning in Cheltenham, by means of a prism. So, instead of shadows, there were rainbows everywhere.