Along the halls and out into the whistling wind bareheaded.
We saw a tall wooden scaffolding on the very peak
of the summit, a hundred yards away, and made for it.
We rushed up the stairs to the top of this scaffolding,
and stood there, above the vast outlying world, with hair
flying and ruddy blankets waving and cracking in the fierce
breeze.
"Fifteen minutes too late, at last!" said Harris,
in a vexed voice. "The sun is clear above the horizon."
"No matter," I said, "it is a most magnificent spectacle,
and we will see it do the rest of its rising anyway."
In a moment we were deeply absorbed in the marvel before us,
and dead to everything else. The great cloud-barred disk
of the sun stood just above a limitless expanse of tossing
white-caps - so to speak - a billowy chaos of massy mountain
domes and peaks draped in imperishable snow, and flooded
with an opaline glory of changing and dissolving splendors,
while through rifts in a black cloud-bank above the sun,
radiating lances of diamond dust shot to the zenith.
The cloven valleys of the lower world swam in a tinted
mist which veiled the ruggedness of their crags and ribs
and ragged forests, and turned all the forbidding region
into a soft and rich and sensuous paradise.
