[Illustration: 31. THE GROSSER ALETSCH-FIRN FROM CONCORDIA HUT. The Lötschenlücke on the extreme left.]
At first the disagreeable details are most keenly felt by contrast, but, when an hour has passed and the conflict is well entered upon, they are forgotten. We become accustomed to our surroundings and can, if we will, observe them with a deliberate interest. How the winds tear the mists about! There is no constant blast of air, but a series of eddying rushes, which come and pass like the units of an army. Each seems to possess an individuality of its own. Each makes its attack and is gone. One smites you in the face; another in the back. Some seem not devoid of humour; they sport with the traveller in a grim way. Others are filled with rage. Others come on as it were reluctantly.
The aspect of the foreground rapidly changes. Rocks and stones disappear under a thickening blanket of snow. What was a staircase on the way up is found to be a powdery snow-slope in the forced descent. The new snow is soft like a liquid. It flows into the footprints and blots them out. Can it be that there are places somewhere where it is warm and dry--places with roofs over them and snug chimney corners and hot things to eat and drink? How strange the idea already seems! We belong to another world and feel as though we had always belonged to it. Civilised life is like some dream of a bygone night, and this that we are in is the only reality. It, in its turn, we know, will hereafter seem to have been a dream, but now it is the only fact. Here is the world of ice in the making. This is what snow-fields and glaciers come from. Unpleasant is it? Well perhaps! but it is good to have had such experiences. They develop a man's confidence, employ his powers, and enrich his memory.
After all it is the snow regions in their days of storm that I remember best. One tempest that overwhelmed us on the flanks of Mount Sarmiento in Tierra del Fuego--how clearly even its details arise upon the lantern-screen of recollection! We were looking back northward over the Magellan channels towards the southern extremity of the South American continent, and a storm was pouring down thence upon us. "The darkness in the north was truly appalling. It seemed not merely to cover, but to devour the wintry world. The heavens appeared to be falling in solid masses, so dense were the skirts of snow and hail that the advancing cloud-phalanx trailed beneath it. Black islands, leaden waters, pallid snows, and splintered peaks disappeared in a night of tempest, which enveloped us also almost before we had realised that it was at hand. A sudden wind shrieked and whirled around us; hail was flung against our faces, and all the elements raged and rioted together. All landmarks vanished; the snow beneath was no longer distinguishable by the eye from the snow-filled air."