The sitting room was a large apartment, which extended along the whole front of the house. The windows, of course, looked out towards the Jungfrau. There was a long table in the middle of the room, and one or two smaller ones in the back corners. At these tables two or three parties were seated, eating their dinners. In one of the front corners was a fireplace, with a small fire, made of pine wood, burning on the hearth. A young lady was sitting near this fire, reading. Another was at a small table near it, writing in her journal. Around the walls of the room were a great many engravings and colored lithographs of Swiss scenery; among them were several views of the Jungfrau. On the whole, the room, though perfectly plain and even rude in all its furniture and appointments, had a very comfortable and attractive appearance.
"What a snug and pleasant-looking place!" said Rollo, whispering to Mr. George as they went in.
"Yes," said Mr. George. "It is just exactly such a place as I wished to find."
Mr. George and Rollo were both of them tired and hungry. They first called for rooms. The maid took them up stairs and gave them two small rooms next each other. The rooms were, in fact, very small. The furniture in them, too was of the plainest description; but every thing was neat and comfortable, and the aspect of the interior of them was, on the whole, quite attractive.
In about fifteen minutes Rollo knocked at Mr. George's door and asked if he was ready to go down.
"Not quite," said Mr. George; "but I wish that you would go down and order dinner."
So Rollo went down again into the public room and asked the maid if she could get them some dinner.
"Yes," said the maid. "What would you like to have?"
Rollo was considerate enough to know that there could be very little to eat in the house except what had been brought up in a very toilsome and difficult manner, from the valleys below, by the zigzag paths which he and his uncle had been climbing. So he said in reply,-
"Whatever you please. It is not important to us."
The maid then told him what they had in the house; and Rollo, selecting from these things, ordered what he thought would make an excellent dinner. The dinner, in fact, when it came to the table, proved to be a very excellent one indeed. It consisted of broiled chicken, some most excellent fried potatoes, eggs, fresh and very nice bread, and some honey. For drink, they had at first water; and at the end of the meal some French coffee, which, being diluted with boiled milk that was very rich and sweet, was truly delicious.
"I have not had so good a dinner," said Mr. George, "since I have been in Europe."
"No," said Rollo; "nor I."
"It is owing in part, I suppose, to the appetite we have got in climbing up the mountain," said Mr. George.
Just as the young gentlemen had finished their dinner and were about to rise from the table, their attention was attracted by an exclamation of delight which came from one of the young ladies who were sitting at the fireplace when Mr. George and Rollo came in.
"O Emma," said she, "come here!"
Mr. George and Rollo looked up, and they saw that the young lady whose voice they had heard was standing at the window. Emma rose from her seat and went to the window in answer to the call. Mr. George and Rollo looked out, too, at another window. They saw a spectacle which filled them with astonishment.
"It is clearing away," said Rollo. "Let us go out in front of the house and look."
"Yes," said Mr. George; "we will."
So they both left their seats, and, putting on their caps, they went out. As soon as they reached the platform where the bench and the table were standing they gazed on the scene which was presented to their view with wonder and delight.
It was, indeed, clearing away. The clouds were "lifting" from the mountains; and the sun, which had been for some hours obscured, was breaking forth in the west and illuminating the whole landscape with his setting beams. Opposite to where Mr. George and Rollo stood, across the valley, they could see the whole mighty mass of the Jungfrau coming into view beneath the edge of the cloudy curtain which was slowly rising.
The lower portion of the mountain was an immense precipice, the foot of which was hidden from view in the great chasm, or ravine, which separated the Jungfrau from the Wengern Alp. Above this were rocks and great sloping fields of snow formed from avalanches which had fallen down from above. Still higher, there were brought to view vast fields of ice and snow, with masses of rock breaking out here and there among them, some in the form of precipices and crags, and others shooting up in jagged pinnacles and peaks, rising to dizzy heights, to the summits of which nothing but the condor or the eagle could ever attain. Still higher were precipices of blue and pellucid ice, and boundless fields of glittering snow, and immense drifts, piled one above the other in vast volumes, and overhanging the cliffs as if just ready to fall.
In a short time the clouds rose so as to clear the summit of the mountain; and then the whole mighty mass was seen revealed fully to view, glittering in the sunbeams and filling half the sky.
The other guests of the inn came out upon the platform while Rollo and Mr. George were there, having wrapped themselves previously in their coats and shawls, as the evening air was cool. Some other parties of travellers came, too, winding their way slowly up the same pathway where Mr. George and Rollo had come. Mr. George and Rollo paid very little attention to these new comers, their minds being wholly occupied by the mountain.
In a very short time after the face of the Jungfrau came fully into view, the attention of all the company that were looking at the scene was arrested by the commencement of another peal of the same thundering sound that Mr. George and Rollo had heard with so much wonder in coming up the mountain. A great many exclamations immediately broke out from the party.
"There! hark! look!" said they. "An avalanche! An avalanche!"
The sound was loud and almost precisely like thunder. Every one looked in the direction from which it proceeded. There they soon saw, half way up the mountain, a stream of snow, like a cataract, creeping slowly over the brink of a precipice, and falling in a continued torrent upon the rocks below. From this place they could see it slowly creeping down the long slope towards another precipice, and where, when it reached the brink, it fell over in another cataract, producing another long peal of thunder, which, being repeated by the echoes of the mountains and rocks around, filled the whole heavens with its rolling reverberations. In this manner the mass of ice and snow went down slope after slope and over precipice after precipice, till at length it made its final plunge into the great chasm at the foot of the mountain and disappeared from view.
In the course of an hour several other avalanches were heard and seen; and when at length it grew too dark to see them any longer, the thundering roar of them was heard from time to time all the night long.
Rollo, however, was so tired that, though he went to bed quite early, he did not hear the avalanches or any thing else until Mr. George called him the next morning.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 9: They are pronounced as if spelled Gooten arbend.]
CHAPTER X. GOING DOWN THE MOUNTAIN.
Mr. George and Rollo met with various adventures and incidents in going down the next day to Grindelwald which are quite characteristic of mountain travelling in Switzerland.
They did not set out very early in the morning, as Mr. George wished to stay as long as possible to gaze on the face of the Jungfrau and watch the avalanches.
"Rollo," said he, as they were standing together in front of the hotel after breakfast, "how would you like to go up with me to the top of that hill?"