In two or three minutes we rounded a corner, and
then found ourselves in a kind of atmospheric eddy, where the car simply
spun round and round, with the sleds whirling below it.
"Now for it!" shouted Edmund. "Hang on!"
He touched a knob, and instantly we rose with immense speed. We must have
shot up a couple of thousand feet, when the wind, coming over the top of
the icy barrier we had just flanked, caught us again, and swept us off on
a horizontal course. Then, suddenly, the air cleared all round about, as
if a magic broom had swept away the clouds. The spectacle that was
revealed--but why try to describe it! No language could do it. Yet I must
tell you what we saw.
We were in the heart of the _Crystal Mountains!_ They towered round us on
every side, and stretched away in interminable ranges of shining
pinnacles. Such shapes! Such colors! Such flashing and blazing of
gigantic rainbows and prisms! There were mountains that looked to my
amazed eyes as lofty as Mont Blanc, and as massive, every solid mile of
which was composed of crystalline ice, refracting and reflecting the
sunbeams with iridescent splendor. For now we could begin to see a part
of the orb of the sun itself, prodigious in size, and poised on the edge
of the gem-glittering horizon, where the jeweled summits split its beams
into a thousand haloes.
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