But the strangest thing about the voices of the glaciers I have yet to tell. Whenever the sun is shining brightly, as I have said, and the gentians and the globe flowers open their petals and the birds start the chorus of the day, the glacier begins singing, too, humming to itself a pleasant tune. When the sky grows cloudy, even for a short time, the birds stop singing, the flowers cover their faces, the bees and butterflies hurry to shelter, and the glacier's song gradually dies away. Any cloud may bring rain, as far as the flowers and the bees and the butterflies know, and, for the same reason, the winged people hurry to cover because they don't want to get their wings wet. The flowers hide their faces to keep the rain from washing their pollen away, and the birds stop singing because, like the rest of us, they don't feel so cheerful under gloomy skies. But the glacier, why does he stop singing too? Because that murmuring tinkle you heard was made by the water melting on the glacier and running into rivulets a little way under its surface. When the sun stops shining the surface ice stops melting, the water gradually quits running and the murmur of the song dies away. [Illustration: ON THE ROOF OF THE ANDES, WHERE IT'S TOO COLD TO GROW GLACIERS] It is because of these queer human habits of the glacier and, above all, his sensitive response to the moods of days and seasons, that many of the mountain people insist he is not only a living creature, but that he has a soul. We think of all this now as the western sun drops behind the snowy summits, the glacier's song grows silent, and we hear, mingling with the vespers of the birds, voices echoing from crag to crag the words of the psalm, "Praise ye the Lord." These are the voices, of the herdsmen speaking to each other from alp to alp--the evening call to prayer. IV. How the Snow Men, the Glaciers, and the Rocks Go Walking Now that we have learned how glaciers, wild flowers, and butterflies get up into this high world, by climbing up here ourselves in the beautiful springtime, the next thing, I suppose, is to climb down again. But first just look over the edge here and you can get some notion of how high we are, not merely in feet and figures, as we have it in the table of mountain heights in our geography, but in _actual feeling_. "What are those little blocks, all ruled off like a chessboard, away down there?" "Those are the little Swiss farms with the gray roads between." "And those small white things among the farms that look like pieces of grit?" "Those are the Swiss villages." "And the black specks on the slopes of the mountain?" "Those are tourists with their guides, coming up. People, no doubt, whom we should like to know, but we shall have an interesting new acquaintance travelling down with us. You've met some of his family, no doubt, for he's an ice man. There are several of these ice men always travelling down on the glaciers." [Illustration: THE OLD MAN OF BALISTAN