The luminous paint in the window-frame was just perceptibly brighter when the door of the opposite shanty opened, and we heard a heavy step outside. By this time we had become reconciled to the blankets, and we held our breaths with the dread that there might be a sunrise, and that we should have to go out into the piercing air to look at it. There was a battering upon the Brixtonian door, and then a voice: “It’s a quarter past three, sir, and it’s a _very_ thick morning,” and then our heroic fellow-traveller: “Never mind, I’m comin’ out.”
We lay, silent as stones, listening intently. The footstep paused at our door, but relenting, passed on without knocking. Presently we heard the newspaper-man go forth like the dove from the ark, and, after a similarly brief absence, return, and settle himself down in the saloon, where, faithful to the interests of the ‘Brixton Chanticleer,’ he no doubt occupied himself in recording his impressions of the mist. For the sake of our self-respect we rose and looked out of the window--a shuddering glance which scarcely revealed to us the foggy outlines of the other shanty and the cairn of stones.
Beyond these, a thick curtain of mist without a fold in it. In the bitter cold and the hideous daylight we shawled ourselves again in our blankets and slept miserably till seven o’clock, when, after such gruesome toilet as circumstances and a small jug of ice-cold water permitted, we emerged from our cabin, objects that our nearest relations would have been justified in cutting. The gentleman from Brixton had gone, and the sun had arrived too late to arrange a sunrise, but still anxious to oblige. There was also a kettle of boiling water, a loaf of bread, and a clear fire in the stove. All these things disposed us to realise with a new benevolence what an achievement of labour and perseverance was embodied in the Summit Hotel. The ponies on whose backs each plank and each lump of coal has been carried up are alone able to estimate that achievement perfectly, but they are not likely to expatiate on it, and the fleshless mountain-track repudiates the hoof-prints that could tell of scramble and struggle.
Outside the shanty, when we stepped into the open air, we found most of Wales, clad in the chilly, opaline tints of morning, waiting in complacent silence for the inevitable burst of admiration. On three sides of it was a hazy shimmer, a misty sparkle, betraying the environing sea, from the river Dee to the Bay of Cardigan, and close about us were the grey spines and huge slants of the Snowdon range. George Herbert, with a fine discrimination, has said--