WHAT IS MAN? AND OTHER ESSAYS OF MARK TWAIN

of the human profile. By four the back of the head was good, the

military cap was pretty good, the nose was bold and strong, the

upper lip sharp, but not pretty, and there was a great goatee

that shot straight aggressively forward from the chin.

At four-thirty the nose had changed its shape considerably,

and the altered slant of the sun had revealed and made

conspicuous a huge buttress or barrier of naked rock which was so

located as to answer very well for a shoulder or coat-collar to

this swarthy and indiscreet sweetheart who had stolen out there

right before everybody to pillow his head on the Virgin’s white

breast and whisper soft sentimentalities to her in the sensuous

music of the crashing ice-domes and the boom and thunder of the

passing avalanche–music very familiar to his ear, for he had

heard it every afternoon at this hour since the day he first came

courting this child of the earth, who lives in the sky, and that

day is far, yes–for he was at this pleasant sport before the

Middle Ages drifted by him in the valley; before the Romans

marched past, and before the antique and recordless barbarians

fished and hunted here and wondered who he might be, and were

probably afraid of him; and before primeval man himself, just

emerged from his four-footed estate, stepped out upon this plain,

first sample of his race, a thousand centuries ago, and cast a

glad eye up there, judging he had found a brother human being and

consequently something to kill; and before the big saurians

wallowed here, still some eons earlier. Oh yes, a day so far

back that the eternal son was present to see that first visit; a

day so far back that neither tradition nor history was born yet

and a whole weary eternity must come and go before the restless

little creature, of whose face this stupendous Shadow Face was

the prophecy, would arrive in the earth and begin his shabby

career and think of a big thing. Oh, indeed yes; when you talk

about your poor Roman and Egyptian day-before-yesterday

antiquities, you should choose a time when the hoary Shadow Face

of the Jungfrau is not by. It antedates all antiquities known or

imaginable; for it was here the world itself created the theater

of future antiquities. And it is the only witness with a human

face that was there to see the marvel, and remains to us a

memorial of it.

By 4:40 P.M. the nose of the shadow is perfect and is

beautiful. It is black and is powerfully marked against the

upright canvas of glowing snow, and covers hundreds of acres of

that resplendent surface.

Meantime shadow No. 2 has been creeping out well to the rear

of the face west of it–and at five o’clock has assumed a shape

that has rather a poor and rude semblance of a shoe.

Meantime, also, the great Shadow Face has been gradually changing

for twenty minutes, and now, 5 P.M., it is becoming a quite fair

portrait of Roscoe Conkling. The likeness is there, and is

unmistakable. The goatee is shortened, now, and has an end;

formerly it hadn’t any, but ran off eastward and arrived nowhere.

By 6 P.M. the face has dissolved and gone, and the goatee

has become what looks like the shadow of a tower with a pointed

roof, and the shoe had turned into what the printers call a

“fist” with a finger pointing.

If I were now imprisoned on a mountain summit a hundred

miles northward of this point, and was denied a timepiece, I

could get along well enough from four till six on clear days, for

I could keep trace of the time by the changing shapes of these

mighty shadows of the Virgin’s front, the most stupendous dial I

am acquainted with, the oldest clock in the world by a couple of

million years.

I suppose I should not have noticed the forms of the shadows

if I hadn’t the habit of hunting for faces in the clouds and in

mountain crags–a sort of amusement which is very entertaining

even when you don’t find any, and brilliantly satisfying when you

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