The path now began to ascend the inclined floor of the ravine, and the full grandeur of the spectacle burst upon the boys. Even Peanut was silent. It was the most impressive spot they had ever been in.
To their left the cliffs shot up a thousand feet to Boott Spur, to their right they went up almost as high to the Lion’s Head. And directly in front of them, curved in a semicircle, like the wall of a stadium, and carved out of the solid rock of the mountain, was the great head wall, in the half shadow at its base a huge snow-bank glimmering white, on the tenth day of July. Above the snow-bank the rocks glistened and sparkled with hundreds of tiny water streams. All about, at the feet of the cliffs, and even down the floor of the ravine to the boys, lay piled up in wild confusion great heaps of rock masses, the debris hurled down from the precipitous walls by centuries of frost and storm.
“It looks like a gigantic natural colosseum,” said Lou. “The head wall is curved just like the pictures of the Colosseum in our Roman history.”
“Right-o,” cried Peanut. “Say, what a place to stage a gladiator fight, eh? Sit your audience all up on the debris at the bottoms of the cliffs.”
“And have your gladiators come out from under the snow arch,” laughed Mr. Rogers.
They now came to the snow arch, which is formed every June under the head wall, and sometimes lasts as late as August. The winter storms, from the northwest, blow the snow over Bigelow Lawn above, and pack it down into Tuckerman’s Ravine, in a huge drift two hundred feet deep. This drift gradually melts down, packs into something pretty close to ice, and the water trickling from the cliff behind joins into a brook beneath it and hollows out an arch.
The Scouts now stood before the drift. It was perhaps eight or ten feet deep at the front now, and a good deal deeper at the back. It was something like three hundred feet wide, they reckoned, and extended out from the cliff from sixty to a hundred feet. The arch was about in the centre, and the brook was flowing out from beneath it.
“Look!” cried Art, “a few rods down-stream the alders are all in leaf, nearer they are just coming out, and here by the edge they are hardly budded!”