454 PRÆTERITA-II

stones to that of a portmanteau, which were rolling down with it wildly, generally swinging out and in of the water as it waved; but when they came to the shallow parts, tumbled and tossed over one another, and then plunging back into the deep water like so many stranded porpoises, spinning as they went down, and showing their dark backs with wilder swings after their plunge,-white, as they emerged, black, owing to their clearness as seen in the water; the stream itself of a pale clay-colour, opaque, larger by one half than ever I saw it, and running, as I suppose, not less than ten miles an hour; the whole mass, water and ice, looking like some thick paste full of plums, or ill-made pine-apple ice, with quantities of fruit in it, and the whole looking like a solid body; for the nodules of ice hardly changed their relative position during the quarter of a minute they were severally in sight, going down in a mass, thundering and rumbling against the piles of the bridge. It made me giddy to look at it; and the more, because, on raising the eye, there was always the great cataract itself startling one, as if it had just begun and seeming to increase every instant, bounding and hurling itself hither and thither, as if it was striving to dash itself to pieces, not falling because it could not help it; and behind there was a fearful storm coming up by the Breven, its grisly clouds warping up, as it seemed, against the river and cataract, with pillars of hail behind. I stayed till it began, and then crept back through the wood, running from one tree to another-there is really now a bit of blue sky over the Pavillon.*

223. “June 18th.-Evening, nine o’clock. I must not write much, it is past bed-time; went to source of Arveron with my father and mother and Miss Dowie; †

* The green mountain at the base of the Aiguille du Goûter.

† Sybilla. See Fors, Letter 90th, “Lost Jewels,” p. 165.¹

¹ [The reference is to the first edition: see now Vol. XXIX. pp. 426-428. And for Miss Dowie, see also above, i. § 260 (p. 232).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]