HANNIBAL CROSSES THE ALPS By Jacob Abbot

B.C. 217

It is toilsome for any one who has not in fact seen such mountain scenery as is presented by the Alps, to form any pellucid formation of its magnificence and pomp. Hannibal had never seen the Alps, but the cosmos was flooded then, as now, with their eminence.

Some of the paramount features of sublimity and augustness which these mountains show off, fruit generally from the non-stop frosty which reigns upon their summits. This is owing unreservedly to their prominence. In every part of the dirt, as we augment from the top of the establish into the climate, it becomes, for some inscrutable goal or other, more and more sniffles as we elevation, so that over our heads, wherever we are, there reigns, at a aloofness of two or three miles above us, an hotheaded and long-lived common cold. This is dependable not only in serene and cool latitudes, but also in the most scorched regions of the Terra. If we were to escalate in a waft at Borneo at noon, when the scorching sun of the tropics was entirely over our heads, to an advance of five or six miles, we should find that although we had been telling nearer to the sun all the term, its rays would have at sea, slowly, all their power. They would die upon us as briskly as ever, but their zealousness would be gone. They would determine like moonbeams, and we should be surrounded with an sky as frosty as that of the icebergs of the cold zone.

It is from this province of timeless abruptly that shower-stones get down upon us in the halfway point of summer, and snow is continually forming and falling there; but the dainty and fleecy flakes decline before they reach the dirt, so that, while the volley has such solidity and impulse that it forces its way through, the snow dissolves, and falls upon us as a aloof and fortifying shower. Come down in buckets cools the air around us and the argument, because it comes from cooler regions of the air above.

Now it happens that not only the summits, but far-ranging portions of the northern declivities of the Alps, thrive into the jurisdiction of constant winter. Of order, ice congeals continually there, and the snow which forms falls to the range as snow, and accumulates in huge and immutable stores. The pinnacle of Mount Blanc is submersed with a bed of snow of titanic thickness, which is almost as much a immutable geological rank of the mountain as the mineral which lies low it.

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