Page:Through South Westland.djvu/315

Rh after this we left the forest behind, and came out on the river.

And now we began to see the full beauty and the solemn grandeur of the place. To right and left the mountains converged till the whole valley was blocked by a mighty mass, well-nigh perpendicular, whose summits were snow-covered to within a few hundred feet of their tops, where the black rocks ran up in pyramids too steep for snow. Along this wall the eye travelled eastwards over pure snowfields to a magnificent ice-fall, looking from here as if it must actually be moving, its colour exquisite in its tones of green below the snow-white waves. And then, just as last year it was described to me on the West Coast, rose clear and pure the “great Silver Cone against the blue.” One unbroken wave of snow seemed to run up one side to the very top, which, looked at with the naked eye, appeared almost a point, but the field-glasses revealed a double crown. The face towards us was only lightly powdered with snow: it was almost sheer. From where it rose, the mountains presented a savagely broken view of riven rock and snow-field, culminating in a mighty curved wave of glacier, which overhung a sheer precipice—a purple, misty gulf, so deep and dark we could only guess its probable depth at a thousand feet or more. Farther up it looked like a great cleft in the mountain wall; and another glacier blocked the head of it—an awesome chasm.

All I had been told was true, and more; and as