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