“Transformation”

“What a different world he discovered! One night of snowfall had utterly transformed his mountaintop. What had been gray and brown was now uniformly white. What had been sharp-edged was now smooth-faced. What had been moonlike now resembled the North Pole of one’s childhood fantasies. Only the waterfall and the lake remained as they had been. The strings of silvery water continued to cascade down the steep gradient of the falls, and the sapphirine surface of the lake stood out now like a giant blue gemstone in a perfectly contrasting setting of truly white gold. But everywhere else one saw only white. The piling of the snow reconfigured the topography of the place. So many jagged edges had been reshaped, overnight, into gentle undulations, which looked to have been worked by a master sculptor on a grand scale. Stony stretches a hundred yards wide were now smoothly polished avenues of pristine white. Holes and depressions had been tastefully filled in. Irregularities of contour had been made to give way to a conformation of elegant design.”