An unspoken friendship by this time bound Charley and me together, silent in its beginnings and slow in its growth--not the worst pledges of endurance. And now for the first time in our journey, Charley was hidden from his father: the sail came between them. He glanced at me with a slight sigh, which even then I took for an involuntary sigh of relief. We lay leaning over the bows, now looking up at the mist blown in never-ending volumed sheets, now at the sail swelling in the wind before which it fled, and again down at the water through which our boat was ploughing its evanescent furrow. We could see very little. Portions of the shore would now and then appear, dim like reflections from a tarnished mirror, and then fade back into the depths of cloudy dissolution. Still it was growing lighter, and the man who was on the outlook became less anxious in his forward gaze, and less frequent in his calls to the helmsman. I was lying half over the gunwale, looking into the strange-coloured water, blue dimmed with undissolved white, when a cry from Charles made me start and look up. It was indeed a God-like vision. The mist yet rolled thick below, but away up, far away and far up, yet as if close at hand, the clouds were broken into a mighty window, through which looked in upon us a huge mountain peak swathed in snow. One great level band of darker cloud crossed its breast, above which rose the peak, triumphant in calmness, and stood unutterably solemn and grand, in clouds as white as its own whiteness. It had been there all the time! I sunk on my knees in the boat and gazed up. With a sudden sweep the clouds curtained the mighty window, and the Jungfrau withdrew into its Holy of Holies. I am painfully conscious of the helplessness of my speech. The vision vanishes from the words as it vanished from the bewildered eyes. But from the mind it glorified it has never vanished. I have _been_ more ever since that sight. To have beheld a truth is an apotheosis. What the truth was I could not tell; but I had seen something which raised me above my former self and made me long to rise higher yet. It awoke worship, and a belief in the incomprehensible divine; but admitted of being analysed no more than, in that transient vision, my intellect could--ere dawning it vanished--analyse it into the deserts of rock, the gulfs of green ice and flowing water, the savage solitudes of snow, the mysterious miles of draperied mist, that went to make up the vision, each and all essential thereto.