Think of the creatures scampering over and burrowing in it, and the birds building their nests upon it, and the trees growing out of its sides, like hair to clothe it, and the lovely grass in the valleys, and the gracious flowers even at the very edge of its armour of ice, like the rich embroidery of the garment below, and the rivers galloping down the valleys in a tumult of white and green! And along with all these, think of the terrible precipices down which the traveller may fall and be lost, and the frightful gulfs of blue air cracked in the glaciers, and the dark profound lakes, covered like little arctic oceans with floating lumps of ice.

Think too of the change in their own substance-no longer molten and soft, heaving and glowing, but hard and shining and cold. Think of the change, and you will no more wonder that there should be something awful about the very look of a mountain: from the darkness-for where the light has nothing to shine upon, it is much the same as darkness-from the heat, from the endless tumult of boiling unrest-up, with a sudden heavenward shoot, into the wind, and the cold, and the starshine, and a cloak of snow that lies like ermine above the blue-green mail of the glaciers and the great sun, their grandfather, up there in the sky and their little old cold aunt, the moon, that comes wandering about the house at night and everlasting stillness, except for the wind that turns the rocks and caverns into a roaring organ for the young archangels that are studying how to let out the pent-up praises of their hearts, and the molten music of the streams, rushing ever from the bosoms of the glaciers fresh-born. Now think: out of that caldron, where all the bubbles would be as big as the Alps if it could get room for its boiling, certain bubbles have bubbled out and escaped-up and away, and there they stand in the cool, cold sky-mountains. And as our hearts keep us alive, so that great lump of heat keeps the earth alive: it is a huge power of buried sunlight-that is what it is. For the heart of the earth is a great wallowing mass, not of blood, as in the hearts of men and animals, but of glowing hot melted metals and stones. They are portions of the heart of the earth that have escaped from the dungeon down below, and rushed up and out.

The princess and curdie